maxernst wrote...
I'm also terrible about spotting typos in my own work--I think you just read what's in your head instead of what's actually before you. Sometimes I think I'm better not even to reread it because often it's during the editing process that I mess things up by leaving behind pieces of the sentence that no longer make sense. But I wouldn't have problems reading other people's stuff for grammar and spelling. It's the substantive criticisms that I'd have a hard time offering because sometimes it's a question of personal taste or how I see a particular character.
I think there's also a review/critique distinction that's worth keeping. A review, ideally, should give potential readers some idea of whether a story is likely to interest them. A critique should give feedback to the writer as to how successful the work was and how it might be improved--and might be better handled in a PM than as a public review.
It's really hard to spot your own errors. The more you write/critique/receive critiques, generally the better you become. (Like, I can often go, "Oooh...I've seen this problem a lot, woops, I just made it!" or alternately, "I've been warned about the adverbs and, yup, 12 in one paragraph. Time to clip!") But, generally I've found that both giving and receiving critiques helps a lot with this process.
Now I disagree with you public critique thing for a few reasons:
1) Giving a critique is kind of a pain, particularly a thorough one. But, quite frankly, even saying, "Your POV shifts confuse me" is more work than just not saying anything (especially as you know you may get a flame). Now, I'll agree that if this is someone who's spent hours and hours of time helping me improve my work, I'm cool with the whole "we'll do this however you want it". BUT, if this is a total stranger who has never read/commented on my work, I owe them *nothing*. So then it becomes a question of, "would this stranger rather know or not know that one of the reasons they're averaging 1 comment or less per chapter is probably that readers are thrown off by the POV changes?" I don't know. But if we say, "No concrit in a review, only via PM!", you're going to scare off a lot of people who *might* tell you that kind of thing. (But who possibly couldn't be bothered to send the PM.) Essentially, the concritter is giving their time
free of charge to the person they are reviewing. So, really, I think that they get to choose the way they format their critiques. Not the author. Of course, if the author doesn't want this, they can always put "please do not concrit". (Although you are bound to scare off some readers that way.) I mean, if I thought that in this fandom authors wanted it, I would give a critique to everything that I read. Even if I only read two paragraphs. Because it still only takes me about two seconds to say, "The reason I stopped reading this fic was X", and that knowledge can be incredibly helpful to a writer. (Hell, I wish I knew why people stopped reading my stories, you know?) But I'm not going to do much more than scroll down the page to hit the "review" button (or "comment" button on LJ) because I'm lazy. Unless, of course, this is someone who's done something for me in the past and I feel semi-obliged to help them out.
2) Other people learn from public concrit. This is a way of making concrit go that much farther, particularly the super thorough critiques that take a half hour or more (a solid, thorough critique takes 30-60 minutes). For instance, if I post a story, and my beta critiques it publicly, not only do I learn from my mistakes, but other people can learn. For instance, if my beta says, "You kind of went OOC here with Alistair" and "I found this section hard to follow" and "the pacing was off here", people who read the story and possibly disliked it for those reasons, but weren't able to articulate them, now know what was wrong with the fic. They now can look for similar problems in their own stories, and in stories of people who they are concritting. This is part of why in writing workshops most critiquing is public, not private.
Now, I think that it's 100% fair to say, "I'm writing fanfiction as a hobby, I don't really care if I improve" or "my ego is super fragile" or whatever. But if you write "I want concrit!" in your author's note, I think that it's fair to expect it in your reviews. And if you really, really don't want it, the best approach is probably to say, "Please don't give me concrit" or "if you want to give me concrit, please PM!" in an author's note.
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