Does Writing.SE accept critique requests?

Question

For pretty much all of the time I've been active here (more than three years now), we've allowed critique questions and I've wondered if they're a good idea. Let me recap:

The on-topic summary says this about critique questions:

Critiques:

You can ask a Q&A question concerning your own work, but you can't just ask for feedback. Critique questions must be phrased in such a way that answers can be objectively voted on.

Suggested format:

"I tried X but had problem Y"
- Excerpt (or a link to one)
- specific question about your sample or specific guidelines for the critique.

This links to the general critique guidelines and a clarification.

We get a lot of questions that don't follow these guidelines -- people posting an excerpt and asking for general feedback, or asking about some aspect of it but in a way that's hard to answer. These generally get put on hold, but even when they're brought into line with our guidelines, I find myself wondering if they are a good fit.

What's the problem?

You might say: "Monica, if you don't like critique questions then just skip them; some people obviously like asking and answering them, so what's the harm?"

My concern is that we give the impression of being a writing circle, a general-support site for people who want subjective feedback on their work. While outstanding answers to these questions can help others sometimes, the norm is that the only beneficiary of the answers to a critique question is the asker. That's not the model that Stack Exchange is based on; we want to help the asker and the next ten or hundred or thousand people who have that problem and come to us via Google.

Meanwhile, if we give the impression of being a writer's circle more than an internet resource for answers to questions about writing, I worry that we make it harder to attract the kinds of questions that are really Stack Exchange's strength, and that we make it harder to attract the users who will ask and answer those questions. No SE site flourishes without expert users asking and answering good, durable questions.

You get what you build. Are we building a site for experts?

I don't want to give the impression that I don't care about helping people get their work read and critiqued. I do care about that; it's one way of building a community of people who care about each other. Chat seems well-suited to this, both for formal sessions like the weekly writing challenge and for more-spontaneous, "drop-in" feedback. People come to chat with a link and a request to look, and people do that sometimes. (We could stand to increase the use of our chat room, and I stand guilty here, but it does happen.)

So what do we do about it?

That's what the answers to this question are for. I'm going to propose one approach, and I hope others will add theirs as well.

Answer 1

TL;DR: Critique questions are off-topic, because they will be helpful only to you and the text you post. Questions using your writing to illustrate a question, however, are on-topic.

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The main problem with critique questions is that they focus too much on the specific passage at the expense of the broader question. Only one person will be helped by improvements to that passage.

To make critique questions acceptable at all we say that they must be about something specific -- like writing realistic dialogue, or building suspense, or obscuring the gender of the POV character, or whatever. Those are all great topics for questions here -- but they don't need to be framed as critiques!

My proposal is that we, essentially, flip the focus on critiques. We don't do critiques, period. We do welcome questions on specific aspects of writing that might be best illustrated with a short passage. That's fine. But answers need to be free to focus on the question, addressing or not addressing the example as they see fit.

Consider the difference between:

[Three paragraphs]

I'm worried that I'm not being evocative enough in my description of the setting. How can I better make the reader feel like he's there?

And:

What are the keys to writing evocative scene descriptions without going on at length or presenting a visit from the exposition fairy? What aspects should I focus on to help the reader get a clear mental image of the scene?

For example, I feel that the following is not descriptive enough:

[sample paragraph]

But when I tried to improve it by adding more adjectives -- which I've heard is good -- it now seems pretentious and wordy:

[another sample paragraph]

What are the best ways to describe a setting?

That second question feels like one that's solidly in scope for Writing.SE and will help others in the future. Answers will probably talk about choices of adjectives, about sequencing a description, about using all the senses and not just sight, and about knowing when enough is enough. None of that is specific to the passage that the asker is trying to write, but all of it will help him.

That's the kind of question I want to see here. And it's nothing like a critique, even though it includes excerpts from the work being written.

Answer 2

I might just be rephrasing Monica in other words, but here's my take.

I think critique questions are very poor in Stack Exchange's Q&A format. We've been trying different variations and requirements, but ultimately, all we're doing is hobbling both the Q&A format and the concept of a writing critique.

I don't think Writing.SE is well-served by dozens of "Does this opening grip you?" questions. And I don't think writers are well-served by picking out a few paragraphs of their work, and choosing one single element of it to get feedback on.

Here's the thing: writers can get real, full critiques at other places without all the trouble. There are, in fact, some truly excellent websites available which thrive on mutual feedback and critique circles; I don't see any benefit to anybody in forcing critique requests into a Q&A format.

Therefore, I believe Writing.SE's policy should be: Critique requests are off-topic.

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That being said, if you have a Q&A question about your own writing , then that's terrific. My formulation for a good question looks something like this:

I'm trying to accomplish [GOAL]. But I'm not succeeding, because when I try I encounter [PROBLEM].

Having a goal you're trying to reach, actual attempts to get there, and a concrete problem on the way - that's practically an ironclad guarantee that you've got a real, answerable Q&A style question.

That means that:

• Instead of "Does my opening grab you?", you might get "I'm trying to write a catchy opening, but I have too much exposition to get through."
• Instead of "Does this scene seem romantic to you?", you might get "I'm trying to write a romantic scene, but every line I have seems cliche."
• Instead of "Are my metaphors working for you?", you might get "I'm trying to use metaphors, but I can't tell if they're any good."

Notice how each of these questions sounds like it might be useful to other writers, because it's a solution to a problem - not just personal feedback for the one person asking.

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Bottom line:

Critique questions should be off-topic. Good Q&A questions referring to your own work are not critique questions. If you need to say "This isn't quite a good, clear question, but it does fall within our critique guidelines," then it isn't a good, clear, question, and it shouldn't be on-topic for us.

Answer 3

I agree that critique questions have a problematic "too localized" nature, but some critique questions seem difficult to express while avoiding being "too broad".

Examples (from questions I have answered)

"Am I using too many adjectives/adverbs in the following piece?" would probably be too broad as "How can one tell when one is using too many adjectives/adverbs?". However, breaking this general topic into more specific questions may form awkward boundaries where several questions are closely related.

For example, "In a scene of natural wonder, how can one tell when one is using too many adjectives/adverbs?" (answers would deal with exciting wonder where extra words would tend to work against the desired pacing and the original question's peaceful wonder where extra words would tend to work with the desired pacing) might be too similar to "In a scene of ceremonial splendor, ..." even though answers to the latter should include significantly different advice (for ceremonial splendor, more sophisticated/artificial adjectives/adverbs would be more appropriate), though "In describing a crime scene investigation, how can one tell when one is using too many adjectives/adverbs?" would only be loosely related.

"Does my poem convey the character of the (fictional) author well?" seems like a very difficult question to generalize. "What traits in a poem would express the frustrated compassion of its fictional author?" would not be able to touch on the significance of etiquette (which would impact the use of form in the poem) and might still be "too localized". ("What traits in a poem would express its fictional author's compassionate frustration with certain mortal follies?" would be even more localized.)

"How to better describe “jet-black (pitch-black) darkness”?" might not lose too much with a change to "How can one avoid overuse of a specific noun-adjective pair?". Adding "In a translation" would include some additional considerations but would also significantly localize the question. (My rephrasing of the question is substantially biased by my own answer, though roughly half of my answer was critique-oriented advice specific to the examples.)

None of these questions are highly rated (which may relate to their more localized nature, the fundamental problem with critique-type questions), but even though all of them seem to contain what could become a "useful question" forming that question such that answers would still answer the original poster's question reasonably well seems difficult.

My own biases

I enjoy answering critique-oriented questions because such questions seem to make focused analysis easier and can sometime use my less tuned lyric sense. I am also somewhat proud that I tend to provide somewhat broader answers, though my answer to "Am I using too many adjectives/adverbs in the following piece?" is very much like a writing circle response and my answer to "Does my poem convey the character of the (fictional) author well?" is only moderately less so (the second half of my answer to the third question is also very like a writing circle response).

Dropping the critique aspect would seem to severely limit the lyrical fun in answering questions (I enjoy coming up with and sharing alternative phrasings), though, as noted in the question, Stack Exchange is not about indiscriminately providing fun to users but about providing good answers to more broadly interesting questions.

Answer 4

If I understand this correctly (and I'm really not sure about that), than the main concern here is about presenting the question.

Monica, you and Standback give examples of bad question, reorder and rephrase them and then say these questions would fit that way. If I get the chain of thought behind that correctly, you say the regrouped questions give other users a better clue what the questions are about.

If that is your argument then here we go:

1. If you can improve a question, then please do it. We do not have to ban critique questions for that.

2. Learning (not only for writing) is best done (IMHO) when the lesson is accompanied with examples. A critique question gives us the example for free. Even other users looking at that example can learn from it and adapt it to the problem they have.

3. I have the feeling that you have a user in mind who scans our Q&A list in the search of help. Because only then the reordering (see above) would really benefit him. But that's not the case. Users find us via Google. They see in the Google overview their keywords highlighted. Then they decide and click the link. So the order/grouping of the question parts isn't that relevant (even though I would prefer it the way you suggested, but I stay realistic here).

So, all in all, I do not see harm for our site due to critique questions. Leave the guidelines in place.