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Guidelines for Good Criticism

8letters said:
My advice to readers would be to leave a comment. What it says doesn't matter. I just enjoy getting comments and want more of them.

Comments are both useful and not very useful. One person's very short opinion doesn't tell me much, but lots of different short opinions might tell me something.

The only comments I leave now days are thanks to the writer for sharing an enjoyable story.
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This is pretty much where I'm at too. I'm not convinced the Comment option at the end of stories is really suitable for constructive critique. If I'm going to try to do that, I'd need to do it as I read the piece, and give examples in order to make such critique useful. But to try this on the Comment screen would seem silly to me. To me, the place for critique is in Story Feedback or in private between author/editor/beta-helper. On Comments, I follow Bambi's mother's rule ;)

On another thought; It seems to me that a much more valuable 'view count' would be based on the number of unique hits on the last page of a story than the first. That would probably be a much more accurate count of reads. The number of 'reads' and the 'rating' would then provide much more important information than the 1-comment per1000-views—which seems a common description of the the rarity of comments.
 
yukonnights said:
This is pretty much where I'm at too. I'm not convinced the Comment option at the end of stories is really suitable for constructive critique. If I'm going to try to do that, I'd need to do it as I read the piece, and give examples in order to make such critique useful. But to try this on the Comment screen would seem silly to me. To me, the place for critique is in Story Feedback or in private between author/editor/beta-helper. On Comments, I follow Bambi's mother's rule ;)

On another thought; It seems to me that a much more valuable 'view count' would be based on the number of unique hits on the last page of a story than the first. That would probably be a much more accurate count of reads. The number of 'reads' and the 'rating' would then provide much more important information than the 1-comment per1000-views—which seems a common description of the the rarity of comments.
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I've received some very thoughtful critiques through the email option. I don't know why more people don't use it. I guess many commenters are much more concerned with communicating with other readers than with the author.
 
When I was younger, my father (a professional screenwriter) provided this very helpful criticism of one of my stories, which I still have on my wall, yellowed with age:

Firstly, you assume the reader is familiar with "Carl". You ought to mention that he is your brother. Similarly with "Dagger". It's not clear at first reading that he's the family dog.

Your spelling needs more attention. Note that "waged" is not the same as "wagged", which is what I believe you meant in the fourth sentence. There are four spelling mistakes in "Mum pooled the string from Daggers but with a para pliyrs". And remember apostrophe placement.

You don't explain that the Alien (not "Alen") had wheels instead of legs, which is why he made the "trale" after he rolled over Dagger's poopy. Readers will fail to understand this.

The ending, "Then it got to late cuz it was school nexday", is perhaps a little abrupt.

All in all, a good effort. Keep writing!
 
NoJo said:
When I was younger, my father (a professional screenwriter) provided this very helpful criticism of one of my stories, which I still have on my wall, yellowed with age:

Firstly, you assume the reader is familiar with "Carl". You ought to mention that he is your brother. Similarly with "Dagger". It's not clear at first reading that he's the family dog.

Your spelling needs more attention. Note that "waged" is not the same as "wagged", which is what I believe you meant in the fourth sentence. There are four spelling mistakes in "Mum pooled the string from Daggers but with a para pliyrs". And remember apostrophe placement.

You don't explain that the Alien (not "Alen") had wheels instead of legs, which is why he made the "trale" after he rolled over Dagger's poopy. Readers will fail to understand this.

The ending, "Then it got to late cuz it was school nexday", is perhaps a little abrupt.

All in all, a good effort. Keep writing!
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I want to read that story.
 
SimonDoom said:
This rule: "Faster, faster, Bambi!" ??
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Sorry, it's Thumper's mom; The character Thumper first appears in the film Bambi, watching as Bambi is first presented as the young prince to the creatures of the forest. He remarks that Bambi is "kinda wobbly" but is reproved by his mother who makes him repeat what his father had impressed upon him that morning, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all".[3] This moral is now known by such names as the "Thumperian principle", "Thumper's rule" or "Thumper's law". [Wikipedia]

The "Faster, faster Bambi!" line is the one my wife likes when we're in bed 'practicing' :D
 
yukonnights said:
Sorry, it's Thumper's mom; The character Thumper first appears in the film Bambi, watching as Bambi is first presented as the young prince to the creatures of the forest. He remarks that Bambi is "kinda wobbly" but is reproved by his mother who makes him repeat what his father had impressed upon him that morning, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all".[3] This moral is now known by such names as the "Thumperian principle", "Thumper's rule" or "Thumper's law". [Wikipedia]

The "Faster, faster Bambi!" line is the one my wife likes when we're in bed 'practicing' :D
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Godzilla meets Bambi - a cartoon not for delicate eyes. Yukon, you'd better not go looking for it, you seem to know far too much about the subject :).
 
We always talk about the number of comments we receive, but how many comments do we ourselves give? I don't read a huge number of stories, but when I do read one I really like I try to write a comment (sometimes anonymously, sometimes not) letting the author know. I try to be specific about what I liked, and to write the type of comment that I would like to receive. But it is a chore. Sometimes I don't end up saying much besides "thanks," and sometimes I don't get around to sending the comment at all.

I agree with those who point out that comments are not necessarily critiques. I comment basically to let an author know that I enjoyed a story. Simon's rules are good for commenting as well as critiquing.

I confess that twice I've (anonymously) broken rule 4 by criticizing what I thought was gratuitous misogyny from authors whose literacy led me to expect something better. Both times I was schooled (in follow-up comments from the authors) that I didn't know what I was talking about. So now I just go thumper on that kind of thing.
 
HectorBidon said:
We always talk about the number of comments we receive, but how many comments do we ourselves give? I don't read a huge number of stories, but when I do read one I really like I try to write a comment (sometimes anonymously, sometimes not) letting the author know.
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Like you, I don't read much here; but I have got into the habit more recently of leaving a comment if something really hits a sweet spot. Often it's just a copy of an excellent sentence from the story, with a, "Damn, that's good" kind of a reaction.

But nothing like the wonderful opus you left on my Amanda story (in response to AwkwardMD's critique) - although I blather on in the Feedback Forum more than I should, because folk are specifically seeking input there.
 
yukonnights said:
On another thought; It seems to me that a much more valuable 'view count' would be based on the number of unique hits on the last page of a story than the first. That would probably be a much more accurate count of reads. The number of 'reads' and the 'rating' would then provide much more important information than the 1-comment per1000-views—which seems a common description of the the rarity of comments.
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I think I read somewhere that a "read" is when the story gets pulled from the database. A story is stored as one big file, and the front-end software is what does the pagination.
 
8letters said:
I think I read somewhere that a "read" is when the story gets pulled from the database. A story is stored as one big file, and the front-end software is what does the pagination.
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From the Site's standpoint, views probably are a more important data point than reads.

It would be useful to authors, however, if there were some way to track more or less how many people actually finish reading their stories. As it stands, the range of possibilities, based on the data we have, is huge: somewhere between views and votes, for which the average ratio is around 100:1.
 
SimonDoom said:
From the Site's standpoint, views probably are a more important data point than reads.

It would be useful to authors, however, if there were some way to track more or less how many people actually finish reading their stories. As it stands, the range of possibilities, based on the data we have, is huge: somewhere between views and votes, for which the average ratio is around 100:1.
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A rough datapoint would be to see how the ratio of views to votes changes with story length. Is there a linear falloff as the page count goes up, or does it remain consistent past a certain page count?

Confusing the issue, if I read the first 5 pages of a longer story and need to come back later, does the site track IP addresses well enough to know I’ve returned and it’s not a new view? If not, the view to vote ratio for longer stories will be lower than it should be.
 
Javahead said:
A rough datapoint would be to see how the ratio of views to votes changes with story length. Is there a linear falloff as the page count goes up, or does it remain consistent past a certain page count?

Confusing the issue, if I read the first 5 pages of a longer story and need to come back later, does the site track IP addresses well enough to know I’ve returned and it’s not a new view? If not, the view to vote ratio for longer stories will be lower than it should be.
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The view:vote ratio increases as the story gets longer, but it's not a linear progression and it's not as marked as you might think. That's what I see in my stories, anyway.

To my knowledge, every time you come back to a story it counts as a new view. There is no effort to track IP addresses.
 
8letters said:
I think I read somewhere that a "read" is when the story gets pulled from the database. A story is stored as one big file, and the front-end software is what does the pagination.
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Well dang! There's another great idea going down in flames. Seems the whole world is stacked against us poor slave story spinners :confused: (wonder what Bambi's mom would say about that? Maybe that's what the 'Run, Bambi, run!' warning is about?)
 
SimonDoom said:
To my knowledge, every time you come back to a story it counts as a new view. There is no effort to track IP addresses.
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Correct. Each time you visit a story, the View count goes up by one (based on tests on my own stories, to satisfy my curiosity).

The site actually does track IP addresses for Votes (as evidenced by the fact that I discovered, on somebody else's story, that I'd read it before and voted). It only tracks when you're logged in - if you come back without being logged in, you can vote again if you want to (but I don't know if that second vote would get swept or not).
 
SimonDoom said:
The view:vote ratio increases as the story gets longer, but it's not a linear progression and it's not as marked as you might think. That's what I see in my stories, anyway.

To my knowledge, every time you come back to a story it counts as a new view. There is no effort to track IP addresses.
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I have published 23 chapters of Mary and Alvin. The overall pattern fits in with most series, the second chapter has fewer views than the first, and the readership gradually declines until it reaches a mostly uniform base level. But certain chapters spike up higher than others. Since it's unlikely that new readers are picking the story up in chapter 10 or Chapter 17, I assume that the viewer count is recording return readers who are rereading favorite chapters.
 
MelissaBaby said:
Since it's unlikely that new readers are picking the story up in chapter 10 or Chapter 17, I assume that the viewer count is recording return readers who are rereading favorite chapters.
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Yes, I've seen that bump on my chaptered stories; I've always attributed it to multiple reads. They are generally hotter chapters so far as the sex scenes go. It's reverse tracking the pervs, I reckon :).
 
MelissaBaby said:
I have published 23 chapters of Mary and Alvin. The overall pattern fits in with most series, the second chapter has fewer views than the first, and the readership gradually declines until it reaches a mostly uniform base level. But certain chapters spike up higher than others. Since it's unlikely that new readers are picking the story up in chapter 10 or Chapter 17, I assume that the viewer count is recording return readers who are rereading favorite chapters.
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This is somewhat true, but not as true as you might think. I think that quite a few readers click on late chapters in a series despite having not read previous chapters. They may do so to get a quick idea about the story before heading to the first chapter. I don't know. But I say this because the view:vote ratio does not change THAT much as a chaptered story progresses.

If late chapter views truly approximated actual reads, one would expect that the view:vote and view:favorite ratio of late chapters would be dramatically different from that of the first chapter. I don't find that to be the case. So I think even with late chapters there are many people who view the story but don't read it.
 
SimonDoom said:
This is somewhat true, but not as true as you might think. I think that quite a few readers click on late chapters in a series despite having not read previous chapters. They may do so to get a quick idea about the story before heading to the first chapter. I don't know. But I say this because the view:vote ratio does not change THAT much as a chaptered story progresses.

If late chapter views truly approximated actual reads, one would expect that the view:vote and view:favorite ratio of late chapters would be dramatically different from that of the first chapter. I don't find that to be the case. So I think even with late chapters there are many people who view the story but don't read it.
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But if the extra views were people just clicking a random chapter to get a feel for the story or to check out the author's style, the extra views would be just that, random. If one chapter has 25% more views that those immediately before or after it, then I think it's likely that at least some of those clicks were repeat reads.
 
MelissaBaby said:
But if the extra views were people just clicking a random chapter to get a feel for the story or to check out the author's style, the extra views would be just that, random. If one chapter has 25% more views that those immediately before or after it, then I think it's likely that at least some of those clicks were repeat reads.
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I agree. I have a series where chapter 3 has more views than chapter 2, and I assume it's because it's more popular and has had more repeat views, because its score is much higher.

My only point, which doesn't undercut what you wrote, is you can't assume that the view total in late chapters closely approximates the read total. It appears to be the case that many people click on late chapters without actually reading them through.
 
I think the comment often relies on whether the reader thinks they are commenting for other readers, or for the author. In both instances, I prefer for them to say what they did or didn't like.

Some people think of the comment as a review, but reviews are for readers, and unless someones hanging around the Feedback Portal, the reader is not going to see it until they've finished the story.

(Like most writers here, I love comments and feedback and beta readers. I just wish I had more of them.)
 
redzinger said:
Some people think of the comment as a review, but reviews are for readers, and unless someones hanging around the Feedback Portal, the reader is not going to see it until they've finished the story.
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I sometimes read the comments first to decide whether or not to read the story. I just wish there was a less clunky way to do it. (Scroll to end of page 1, jump to last page, scroll to end of it, click on show all comments. Sheesh!)

I also sometimes like to hang around the Feedback Portal. You can get a sense for what is going on in categories you don't usually read. And sometimes you can get pointed to a story you might never have otherwise come across. (Although you have to wade through a lot of lame comments too.)
 
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