 Noticing Newbies: June 29, 2022 Issue [#11442] |
This week: The Way You Say It Edited by: Jeff  
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"You never know what you can do until you try,
and very few try unless they have to."
-- C.S. Lewis
About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff and I'm one of your regular editors for the Noticing Newbies Official Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 350 newsletters across the site during that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me via email or the handy feedback field at the bottom of this newsletter! 
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The Way You Say It
Have you ever had the experience of being on the receiving end of someone's "advice" that seems hypercritical or even cruel under the guise of honesty? "Hey, don't get mad at me for tearing down your work, making you feel like an idiot, telling it the way it is, etc. I'm just giving you my honest opinion."
Have you ever had the experience of a reader/reviewer holding you to expectations that you didn't have for yourself or your work? Maybe someone suggests a change to your work based on how they would have written it differently. Maybe they evaluated something you wrote for fun against publishing industry standards even though you have no intention of having it professionally published. Maybe they hold you to the technical standards of a particular style guide when you made very intentional choices to bend or break the "rules" for effect.
How we say something is often just as important as what we say.
What we have to say will often get diluted or downright ignored if the way the message isn't presented well. Some might argue that the audience's interpretation isn't the presenter's concern, but in the case of wordsmiths and others whose trade is the communication of ideas and information, I'd counter that the audience's interpretation is very much the presenter's concern. That's not to say that a presenter can completely control an audience's experience (or that they're responsible for every reaction to their work, intended or otherwise), but the way in which material is presented is something they do have extensive control over, and therefore their choices can have a profound impact on how it is received.
Let's take a look at Writing.com reviews, for example.
In Guidelines To Great Reviewing from Writing.Com 101 , there are six "Key Characteristics for Reviews" that recommendations for readers to consider when composing reviews. They are:
1. be honest
2. be encouraging
3. be respectful
4. be well-rounded
5. match the rating
6. be visually appealing and easy to understand
You might note that being "honest" is the first one listed and it would stand to reason that it's therefore one of the most, if not the most, important quality in a review. But there are then not one but two characteristics which follow and are related to presentation. The honesty in a review should be presented in the context of being both encouraging and respectful. Being "well-rounded" and "visually appealing" are technically also related to presentation so if you really think about it, two key characteristics are related wholly to content ("be honest" and "match the rating") while the other four are related at least in part to the way you present your criticism to the author.
But even if the site didn't have "Guidelines To Great Reviewing" and you could write whatever you wanted in a review, wouldn't it stand to reason that your feedback would be better received if presented with kindness rather than cruelty? With compassion rather than disdain? One of the problems with the practice of offering criticism is that it's easy to become convinced that your opinion carries an outsized weight, especially once your feedback has been well received, or perceived as coming from a place of particular expertise. And it's not exactly a stretch to imagine that critics can get really comfortable in that place, to the point where they cease putting in the effort of "niceties" because what's really important is their input (the content of what they have to say) regardless of its presentation (the way in which they say it).
While this newsletter has primarily discussed criticism or even communication at large in the context of site reviews, it's certainly not limited to just that. How you say what you say has an effect on how people view your conversations, work emails, social media posts, and everything in between. Writers should know better than anybody the power of words, and the different effects words can have based on just a couple of different choices in the way we say things.
With that in mind, I think it's worth taking the time to consider how you present your writing to the world, whether it's your own prose/poetry, or feedback on someone else's. Words matter, as do the way they're strung together. In my twenty years of professional experience and even more years as a writer of various things, I've never found it not worth it to spend a little extra time to make sure the point you're trying to make is presented in the best possible way. And that includes considering your audience and, in addition to being honest with them, also treating them with respect and trying to be encouraging whenever possible.
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
"Blogocentric Formulations"
"New & Noteworthy Things"
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This month's official Writing.com writing contest is:
I also encourage you to check out the following items:
EXCERPT: We humans lived in this earth for such a long time. History , revised stories, and new learnings was passed to us from generation to generation. But no one really had the definite answer. To many studied and had conclusion but still not definite because it was never seen by many or felt by many or touched by many. It was always a big question for us. What comes after death? is there a afterlife?
EXCERPT: I was never into WWE or any of those bloody fighting sports like boxing and UFC. I never understood how someone could enjoy watching two men beating each other, with blood oozing from an eyebrow or from a purple, broken nose. I know WWE isn't real, it's just fake blood and fake pain, which really didn't make any sense to me, either. Isn't the point of these fighting sports to see who the alpha male is, the better and stronger fighter? Why, then, watch something that is planned like WWE? It wasn't until I was forced to watch a wrestling match that I realized I was looking at WWE through the wrong lens the entire time.
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Feedback from "Noticing Newbies Newsletter (June 1, 2022)" about writing competition:
Nobody’s Home  writes:
Great newsletter, as always, Jeff! Timely topic, too, with Quill winners announced so recently and at the forefront of people's minds (or is that just me?)
I can say for myself that my writing suffers immensely if I think for a moment that I'm writing a story with the hope of getting it published (or slightly more likely, winning a contest, getting a Quill nomination, or even just a glowing review!) If I'm not writing because I'm in love with the story and I'm enjoying the process, the words stop flowing and my fantasy story starts to read like an article in a scientific journal. I have to be in it for the love of writing; of course, I've never been a happy competitor.
Cheers!
Cubby  writes:
Loved what you had to say in this article! It's so true, we are in competition with ourselves (or should be.) I never used to enter the Official WDC Contests because I didn't think I was as good as the writers who'd been winning, some of which were repeat winners. Guess what? I decided to try and worked very hard on my entries, editing throughout the month, finding ways to improve my writing. I don't always place in the top three, but I do place occasionally, and it's because I push myself to polish my entry the very best as I can. And it's paid off. 
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