How Do You Feel About Having Your Writing Evaluated?



Posted: Sunday, May 31, 2009

by
Creative Writing Strategies

If that brought up a yucky feeling in the pit of your stomach you may have some issues left over from school where you dreaded the evaluation of the teacher and the grade you were getting or might be getting on the paper you turned in for the assignment.

In addition to dreading the result of the grade, it often brought up an opportunity to be laughed at or ridiculed by classmates.  None of these things gives a good feeling so avoidance of situations that might even suggest these feelings seems high on many prospective writers lists or for that matter any persons list of things they choose to experience.

Left over stuff clogs our life in many areas. In your writing it stops you from doing it and letting other people look at it for fear they might criticize, laugh when you did not mean for it to be funny and ridicule you for writing or trying to write.

Quite an uncomfortable situation so many just continue to talk about the book they will write one day and never actually do anything about it.  So, if you are reading this article, where are you on the scale of being concerned about what others might say?  If your rating is on the high side read on...

This is the time for Do Overs.  By that I mean looking at your writing and seeing what can be changed to bring another result when it is read the next time by another person.  With the tools we have in place with word processing, the delete key and replacing sentences with copy and paste it really is easy to try on another way to say that sentence and if you like it you can keep it, if not you can hit the undo key and the original sentence comes back.

I find trying on different combinations very rewarding and often discover there was a different way to say what I was trying to communicate that made the writing clearer to the reader and made the point better than my first sentence or paragraph.  Give it a try and see what you think.  You can write several different versions then ask others to read and choose the version they like best or find the clearest for them.  A totally different way to get a response that unhooks the dread of what they might say.  People like to give their opinions so what you did was just ask for their opinion.  Nice shift away form the other reaction?

If you have four versions, you might have four distinctly different groups of people who like the different versions.  People learn in different ways so they like to have the information presented to them in their way of learning.  That is ok too.  They will appreciate that you took time to write to them and you will have the satisfaction of communicating multiplied by four times.  A nice result too.

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