A place for Newbies to seek advice about reviewing |
Hi there. I'm extremely new here and I would like to have some of my writing reviewed but I would also like to leave some reviews in kind (it's only fair). The only thing is, I don't know if my reviews are very valuable as I have little to no experience. I figure I can leave a 'Reader reaction' type of review but not get into the technicals. I also don't want to step on any writer's toes and make comments like "I'd word this like this and I'd restructure this sentence like that" so leaving a more technical review makes me extremely nervous. If I made critical errors in my sentence structure or used 1 adjective 78 times in a single paragraph and simply didn't notice, I'd want to know about it. I want to know if this bit gets slow and boring, that bit is good and I love how when this person said that one thing it made them a more rounded character, but the type of reviews I'd want to get would probably be overbearing and for lack of a better word toe-stompy for other people. Also, some of the stuff I've already read is so wildly outside of my wheelhouse, I really don't feel free to comment, for example, I like long-form stuff (as you can probably guess from this post) and I've read a couple of stories that are about 2 - 300 words in length. My first reaction is "I'd love you to expand on this" or "Is this an outline or a finished piece?" and then looking at the profile, everything is max 2 - 300 words so that must just be their style so I can't leave such a comment. Is there somewhere I can find "Here's my 2000 word chapter 1. What do you think?" because these are the types of posts I'm likely to make. Ultimately we are all artists here and we all know what artists can be like. Am I overthinking things or should I just leave a 'Readers reaction' and leave it at that? |