April 2021: Feedback

[morbane]

Hello all,

Thanks again to those who took part in the most recent round of Concrit-X. I'd be interest to know if anything in particular struck you (as a good idea/thing you saw others doing, as something that could be improved), or your general impressions.

My personal notes:

• I saw some people curating sets of their works on AO3 for concrit: for example, by searching on a time period and then linking to the result of that search, or by tagging all relevant works with a specific tag. I wouldn't want to require people to do that, but I thought that was a great and helpful idea.


• Related to above, there's a canonised tag on AO3, "Constructive Criticism Welcome", that I tag most of my works with. I recommend it as a searchable tag if you want to encourage people to give concrit in general. That said, I have rarely and arguably never received concrit without directly soliciting it, probably because concrit is hard work.


• I said I'd run this in November or February, then April, then I started it mid-April. That's not great. I'm sorry about that. Currently, to run this, I need: a) some time to work on any sign-up suggestions people have made in a previous round; b) an empty weekend to work on matching; c) a relatively under-committed period in the following couple of weeks. I'd like to tentatively target August again for the next round.


• Last time, I noted that some people accidentally left concrit in the "wrong" place - ie, on AO3 when someone had requested Dreamwidth, or vice versa. I added extra reminders about that this time, and as far as I saw, the only person who erred that way this time was.... me. It's easy to do. The only thing I can think of to make it less easy to do would be to add the following reminder: if you would prefer to get comments by email/PM or on the platform the story is published on (AO3/ff.net/etc), you can make a request post that has comments turned off entirely.


• Speaking of, I really appreciate people being willing to join this comm as members and make Dreamwidth posts. I think I'm going to continue that (as well as offering "I post for you" / "stay private") ways of signing up, because it's so much easier for me to keep track of, but would be keen to know if there is something I could do to make that easier.

Now

If you don't want any more crit on your posts, you can:
-take the "open for concrit" tag off them
-ask me to take that tag off them
-ask me to hide the post

If you said you would unscreen comments on May 15, please unscreen comments. Check with me if you're not sure how.

The following post is a "Madness" post round, where anyone can ask for concrit but you are not guaranteed any.

Comments

[luzula]

This was the first time I participated, and I will definitely do so again! And also tell my friends about it. : )

[yelp]

I found this exchange very valuable! Thanks again for running!

It was my first time participating, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I think I initially hoped I would get a lot of "Change this specific thing" kind of feedback. While I did get a lot of valuable advice like that, one thing that was surprising to me was how useful it was to just hear people's impressions of my work, or of specific characters or scenes.

Along those lines, azurrys asked the question "What do you find most memorable about the work", which I also found insightful. I so rarely get to hear how these things come across to others, and if this exchange runs again, I will definitely be asking for more feedback of that nature. 

I liked that you asked people to leave comments on the DW post even if the actual concrit was given elsewhere. I know it was for mod admin purposes, but it gave me a feeling of solidarity to occasionally check in and see higher numbers, like we were all doing this feedback thing together and writing our concrit for different works. Along those lines, I don't know why I chose to screen comments on my DW post, haha. I probably won't next time.

Maybe relatedly, I feel like you gave us a lot of options in the sign-up, e.g. where to receive feedback, how blunt feedback should be, whether comments are screened. I didn't have a very strong opinion on any of these things. If it makes the exchange easier to run, I would have been fine with being defaulted to one option, though obviously I can't speak for everyone!

[mireia]

I got a lot out of this exchange and I'm really grateful to you for running it!