Why Critiquing Others Helps You

Photo credit: cellar_door_films on Flickr

I’ve written in the past about the necessity of critique partners and why it’s so important to get your work critiqued, but it has occurred to me recently that I never really discussed the other side of the coin: that is, why it’s important to critique as well as getting critiqued.

You see, as those of you who follow me on Twitter probably know, I’ve been spending a lot of time as of late checking out pitch critique boards and contests. It’s been a lot of fun (and time consuming, but so worth it, you guys) and not just because I’ve had my work looked at.

Because the truth is this: while it’s extraordinarily helpful to get your work critiqued, it’s just as valuable to take the time to critique others.

The thing is, most writers who participate in critique boards and contests take the time to crit other entries mostly for a pay-it-forward/trading critiques type thing. What many of them don’t realize is that by critiquing other writers’ work, they’re actually learning just as much as they do from a critique of their own work.

While critiquing, you learn:

• What works. You’re going to read writing that you absolutely love. Words that you wish you had put there—sentences that you envy and premises that make you second guess yourself. By taking the time to identify exactly what it is that attracts you to that sentence or paragraph or whatever it is, you’re teaching yourself why it works so that you can then apply it to your own writing. 


• What doesn’t work. On the flip side, you’re going to read a lot of writing that doesn’t grab you. Writing that reminds you of when you first started writing or of a book that you didn’t really enjoy. When critiquing, you have to identify these spots—but even more importantly, you have to really think about what could be done to improve it. You have to figure out why it’s not working (or at least why you’re having a negative reaction to it) so that you can tactfully explain why it didn’t work for you.
  
  And guess what? You’re learning again. 


• What others are and aren’t responding to. The most interesting bit of participating in public critiques is seeing how others responded to someone else’s work. Sometimes a line that you loved will be a line that someone else found confusing. Sometimes that first paragraph that you found dull someone else thought was beautifully written. This is not only a great reminder of the meaning of subjectivity, but when you start noticing patterns among the responses (and you will), it really draws attention to the most noticeably successful and unsuccessful elements of writing. 

Moral of the story is this: even if you don’t have something ready for critiquing, it’s still incredibly advantageous to participate in critiques. It’s a learning experience for everyone involved and I promise you’ll learn some lessons about writing that would have been much more difficult for you to glean on your own.

Have you ever participated in a critique board or contest? What other benefits of critiquing someone else’s writing can you think of?