MyGiftedLife.org

I'm in a freshman creative writing class. We just submitted short stories for peer review. I put mine up, with a disclaimer that I hadn't yet figured out the ending.

Most of my classmates had only positive comments, aside from noting the problem with the ending. The person who was assigned to do my peer edit, on the other hand, returned feedback that said I had run-ons "everywhere" and refused to give examples when asked, didn't think the secondary characters were developed enough, couldn't figure out the conflict, and bashed me over the head for my lack of MLA formatting (this was a rough draft, mind you).

So I e-mailed my instructor and asked if she would review our stories before we handed them in. She said she wouldn't, and I told her I had problems with the peer edit (we're supposed to write a process paper saying how we addressed the comments). I didn't disclose my background, but I expected her to crack open my story and have a look to determine whether the comments had any grain of truth. Nope. She responded, explained to me what a run-on sentence was and basically told me my peer editor was probably right and that I shouldn't be defensive about negative criticism, and that this person represented a portion of the reading public, so I should probably listen to them.

Now, I spent the past 5 years working as an editor and proofreader, and before that I was a writing tutor at a community college. I think I know a run-on when I see one. My hunch is that I'm just using more sophisticated sentence construction than this person is accustomed to. I've also workshopped my poems and other work for years -- in fact, I'm not comfortable until it's had some tough criticism. I'm not scared of a wee little negative comment. I just carefully consider the source, and check it against my own educated judgment. And I'm fully capable of applying a style guide; that was my job for 5 years. I just don't think that crap's important at this stage, and it's an amateur thing to bash someone for in a crit.

I think I've muddied the waters through responding, so I've stopped. I don't care to disclose my background if I don't have to. I was hoping to get the benefit of the doubt from my instructor. I think I will wait until I do my process paper, include the crit I've gotten from my regular crit group, and explain the situation and why I've chosen to ignore these comments.

But I am fuming inside. I hate not being listened to, and hate being treated as if I am an 18-year-old with a minimal grasp of grammar and the writing world.

I'm not necessarily looking for advice, just sharing an experience that no doubt happens to all of us all the time. <grr>

Amen. Happens often.

Of course we could just stop trying different things in our writing. We could even write down to the lowest common denominator <cough> like Dan Brown <cough>, but then where's the creative in the writing?

OK, so it's unfair, Dan Brown doesn't write down to the lowest common denominator. He is the lowest common denominator. Atrocious acquires a new meaning in his writing,
as do many other words, precarious being one of them.

The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences - Telegraph bit.ly/bCKh8G
Might give you a laugh.

Don't you just love how many people internally translate "review" into "find something wrong with it"?

Oh, my complaints are a bit different from yours, Barefoot... but I feel your pain.
For me it's an angst due to some vibe I'm picking up on in my classes online... which means there's a bit of a little "social science" experiment of my own going on as I maneuver to meet the demands.
If you let on you know more than others in the class, or possibly know more than they do, you're in deep doo doo.
I find myself needing to scale back in one class, and elaborate unnecessarily in another... And the professors have no inkling of my ability, or level of experience, or past academic achievement. They can't possibly account for that, in classes of 50 or 90 students online... Besides, it's all irrelevant, really... One thing I know, you need to show NOT what YOU know, and NOT what YOU have learned somewhere else....If you let on you "think you know something" they'll be on the lookout for every slight, every clause that might be better on it's own sentence. They want to see what THEY have been able to teach you. They want to see what others are able to discern... not necessarily if it's absolutely correct... but perhaps even if it's just "different"... The students doing the correcting are being graded on what they can spot.
So don't take it personally... I went through this same ordeal in a writing seminar... I wanted to egg the profs house.

Maybe. also it might be helpful to ask outright, toward what sort of audience you are to aim your writing.
That's the only real suggestion I have, although I know you weren't asking for any.
I've written things and been criticized for the "level" being beyond the average reader.

This school "game" is difficult, and not usually so much for the subject matter, but more for determining what song and dance performance they would like you to provide....
And yes, if you ask me it sucks.


I'm saving some of that for grad school... it's a little less ridiculous when you're closer to proving yourself a "peer"...
For the sake of the future, I say, "Play the game, get the paper."
When I am no longer subjected to this tedium, I will be free to practice Psychology based on ethics and guidelines of the APA, and otherwise, how I see fit applying value the theories and methods that I feel are the most authentic and pro-health. (Jung, Maslow, Dabrowski, Gestalt, Movement and Art Therapies...)
Anyone worth their "laude" knows that these things are never taken very seriously anywhere in Academia, but that doesn't mean they're not serious disciplines, it's just that they're far less "measurable" than the results of drugs, or specific behavioral measurements...and therefore, they don't contribute to the 'body of evidence' that legitimizes the science... and it's a kind of institutional, seminal self-doubt that I sense. Psychology as a science seems to have a desperate need to legitimize itself... to stick with "how it's always done"... which does more to betray those who really don't have any kind of contribution to make. Of course they're in it to help people, convinced that if they use the standard, tried and "true" methods... the ones with ever increasing numbers to back them up... they are the players, "safe".. and this is their game.

Can you say "stagnation?" And apart from that, "HO HUM".

And that's MY rant for the day!

Don't get me started.

Whenever I have gone to companies as a temp, and there has been a permanent position available, I have been offered it on the strength of my performance. Yet agencies always make a song and dance about whether you have "experience" at that particular thing, the assumption being that if you have limited or no experience, you won't be able to pick it up quickly. I kept being asked whether I had used any kind of computerized document management system, and being really cynical when I said I hadn't. When I finally went to a company where they had such a system in use, it turned out to be a fancy way of making Outlook assign each doc a tracking number so it could be retrieved easily. I mean, real rocket science, eh?

I feel employers in general tend to assume that everyone learns at the same speed, and that is why it can be so difficult to gain employment in a completely different field and start again. I feel that jobs that I have had to take because they were what was offered at the time and I had bills to pay, have been nothing but a millstone around my neck on my CV. I have suggested that this could be something that W.I.N. (World Intelligence Network) could look into, as a possible campaign to help gifties change career track by raising awareness among HR professionals and employers.

I had a brush with someone who felt they had to play at editors, too. I had written a sentence starting, "I would..." and she just felt compelled to change it to "I should..." The former is a perfectly legitimate grammatical usage, whereas the latter is only a stylistic preference. See, I was paying attention in English class. (I had done O-level English, a rarity among a class of YTS trainees, but the assumption that I was on the training scheme, therefore I wasn't academic.)

One time a customer at my first job was wailing on to the boss about how her address was spelt wrong on her business cards, and the pair of them got onto me because I had processed the order. I got out the order book and showed them the address, in my handwriting, CORRECTLY spelled. It was obviously the printers who had made the mistake, and the woman and my boss apologised. However, that in my mind didn't atone for the fact that I had been put under suspicion in the first place!

Attending a college open day, I was surprised at how incredibly rude one of the admissions tutors was about my lack of performance in school, and how stubborn and peremptory she was about not allowing me to offer alternative evidence of ability. I thought mature candidates were supposed to evaluated on their own individual merits?

There's always some prerequisite bit of paper a person has to have to get onto any training these days, adding unnecessary time and expense for a giftie who just wants the core curriculum. This was another area I suggested W.I.N. could look into.

Ugh, Sorry, Barefoot... I think you've set off a maelstrom, touched a nerve, opened pandora's box....

I moved my response to SueBlue over to a new thread in "work" discussions.... figured I'd keep the place tidy.

barefootwriter, you are right in that the style thing is an amateurish criticism, especially if this is a fiction-writing assignment (in which case the Chicago Manual of Style, if anything, is what you should be going for, but they don't teach that in college). Personally, I see writing as the artform that it is. There should be artist's licence, at least for fiction!

As for run-ons, I've noticed that as the public becomes more "dumbed down" and impatient with reading longer works, the tolerance for comprehending longish, but grammatically correct sentences has declined severely. This leads many to assume that because a sentence is long it constitutes a "run-on" and this is not the case (necessarily). Run-ons are easily confused with fused sentences and comma splices, too (but I expect you know that). You have to decide who you are writing for and cater to the reader's preference enough to be read. I don't write for the general public because I refuse to dumb it down. My style is similar to H.P. Lovecraft's, so yes, fans of his would be a good target audience.

This doesn't mean you have to sacrifice all of your writing talent to pump out garbage. If you make it interesting enough, they'll put up with more of what irritates them slightly. So take the criticism about Plot or Character or Setting seriously, and ask a grammar expert about the mechanical side.

I'm working on finding ways to incorporate the interobang and other unusual, but informative punctuation marks into my works. There should be a mark for rhetorical questions and sarcastic comments for those who are not astute enough to appreciate the subtleties. Try to get a smiley-addict to see his little pictures are modern punctuation, and that your interrobang is just as valid a mark... then try to to get a rigid grammarian to accept an emoticon...

You can't please everyone, so aim to please those, including yourself, who are worth your best efforts.