Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-4833240-20140301051701/@comment-4833240-20140302140400

Mikemacdee wrote: Over the years I've offered so much lengthy, detailed and polite feedback to so many deaf ears that I don't much see the point in being polite anymore. If this were a creative writing course at the local college, everyone involved would be devoted to writing in some capacity, and we would all take each other seriously enough for an in-depth peer review; but this is the internet, where everyone is an impulsive narcissist. Most of the time my feedback recipients don't bother improving anything, or they react in other unpleasant ways (I once gave a girl POSITIVE feedback on a poem that exhibited Buddha-like life principles; she proceeded to burn me at the stake for using such a blasphemous word to describe her work). Anyone who is truly interested in writing will stick with it no matter what, and if all feedback were nice and pleasant they'd never develop the tough skin that writers are required to have -- all criticism stings the ego. Besides, the other creepypasta sites dish out quantities of useless and undeserved praise that shame even DeviantArt, which is even MORE damaging to a budding writer -- it gives him/her a false sense of ego while he/she fails to improve at all, and pampers them to the point where ANY criticism sends them off the deep end.

It's USELESS feedback that gets under my skin: asshole or not, a critic should always say something concrete about an important aspect of the story (don't snobbily downrate a story just for having the audacity to mention Angelou, Poe, and Frost in the same sentence), and they should know what the hell they're talking about (if you criticize "The Hook" for ending abruptly, you don't know how scary stories work). I only get really snarky if the work is truly lazy and self-indulgent. Ah, but asshole is the operative word in this situation. You could give some very sound advice or point out blatant plotholes, grammar errors, etc. If you are an asshole about it, though, the person might not want to take the advice and your efforts will have been wasted. In this case, the wrapping paper is almost as important as the gift.