For thirteen years our at-large writing chapter has held regular critique and review sessions. Since most of the chapter’s members live a good distance from each other, our critique sessions are held online. By popular vote, we have elected to use email to share our submissions with the assigned participants in our critique session group.
To standardize and simplify our critique sessions, we’ve settled on a few guidelines:
- Our chapter holds two critique sessions a month
- Session invitations are sent to all members
- Those with something to submit or who are willing to ‘review only,’ reply that they want to participate this time
- Since our chapter membership is large, session participants are divided into 2 or 3 groups, loosely arranged by genre or preference
- The president creates and emails a small spreadsheet with participant names, emails, and the working title of the submission; only session participants receive the spreadsheet
- Critique session submissions should not exceed 3300 words
- Members have three days to send their submission to those in their assigned group
- This leaves everyone around 10 days to review, critique, and return 3 to 5 submissions
- Most of us use Word’s Tracking Changes feature for changes, suggestions, and comments
Our system works well for members who’ve participated for some time. However, we receive new members each year, many of whom wonder what’s expected of them in a critique session. To offer some ideas of what to look for, we created our chapter’s Critique Cheat Sheet. This cheat sheet offers some guidelines for creating a well-rounded review of someone’s story.
For instance:
Dialogue – Does it move the story forward in a concise, meaningful way? Is it clear who is speaking? Does it feel like the dialogue is being used as a data dump?
Setting – Did you feel like you were involved in the scenes? Did you feel the setting descriptions were too lengthy, causing you to lose interest?
Characters – Is each character important to the story? Do the characters seem real to you? Did you find slips in the POV without a chapter or section break?
Descriptions – Do the descriptions use one or more of the five senses? Does the character seem in sync with the descriptions? If not, is this explained?
Structure – Is sentence length varied throughout the submission? Is the author ‘telling’ more than ‘showing’? Are any scenes unnecessary for moving the story forward?
Redundancy – Do definitions contain words that mean the same thing? Does the author repeat words, phrases, or ideas without adding meaning?
Plotholes – Are there jumps in logic that stifle the reader’s believability in the story? Did you feel like you needed a little more information about an event?
Grammar – Some reviewers like to comment on the author’s diction and punctuation, but this isn’t expected in the review.
I like to send new participants a few good examples of former session critiques. Some of these examples date back 10 years, but were chosen for their outstanding comments. For some of our new members or visitors, I think these examples help them even more than the cheat sheet.
One more note: In their review / critique, members are expected to insert some positive comments as they read, like “Nice sentence,” “Well put,” “Wish I’d written that,” or just “Wow.”
Happy writing!
Ann
