How a Writer to Deal with Readers' Criticism
Contributor
Written by
Christina Battons
February 2017
Contributor
Written by
Christina Battons
February 2017

Criticism may become a great tool for your text improvement. However, unprofessional criticism may only lead to the situations where you feel frustrated and disappointed because of your writing, but do not know why exactly you feel like that. That’s why, for a writer, it is crucially important to know how to deal with criticism and how to take the most out of it.

As a writer, you should always remember that everyone has their own opinion, but there are some people who always want to express their opinion no matter what. Also, you need to remember that there are people whose main pastime is to offend other people. Unfortunately, on the Internet, this happens too frequently.

Who is the best critic?

If you write professionally, you need to take every aspect of writing professionally. We mean that you need to have a team that will help you with writing your texts. If you have a person who criticizes you before you publish your article, you may be sure that everything that you read is only the opinions of other people which differ from yours. However, if you do not have a person who proofreads and edits for you, you will hesitate whether the criticism should make you take some actions or whether you do not need to pay attention to it.

An editor or a proofreader is extremely important for a beginner writer. The matter is that an inexperienced writer does not know how the texts should look. They need someone who will tell them whether they make some mistakes or they do everything correctly. If you are such a writer, you need to listen to other people of your writing papers to understand and fix your mistakes.

5 secrets of dealing with criticism

Learn how to detach

The first skill you need to master is the ability to detach from the words that people tell you. Remember the following thing: these are just the commentaries of people who may not even be interested in your field of writing and who have no expertise in it. Besides, when you do not take everything too close to your heart, you may understand what comments should really be taken into consideration and what comments you should not consider at all.

Ask questions

If some comments make you doubt, it is better to ask questions. Of course, the questions should be asked correctly. You do not need to prove to your readers that you are right or to explain to them that they’ve understood everything wrong. You need to understand what exactly makes them think this way. Do not hesitate to start a dialogue with your readers. The only thing you should avoid is conflict, so if you notice that a person takes your every word aggressively, it is better to stop communicating with them.

Find more critics

If you have noticed that people criticize you differently, you need to find more critics. Remember the rule: if everyone repeats one and the same thing, perhaps they are really right, especially if we talk about criticism in writing. However, it does not necessarily mean that stand-alone comments are useless. Sometimes, one single comment can be more useful to you than a bulk of other comments.

Find a good critic among your readers

This is a good way to communicate with your audience. When you find a person whom you trust and on whose opinion you may rely, it becomes easier to take criticism. It will be enough for you to read the comment of this person to understand what you need to fix and what mistakes you have made previously.

Be confident in what you write

The best way not to pay attention to the criticism is to write in such a way so you are confident in your every word. Of course, it is not so easy to become such a writer, as it takes years of experience and hard work. However, if you make enough effort, you can raise your self-confidence and really become a writer who has no hesitations in the quality of their work.

Criticism is the thing that you will face every single day no matter what job you chose. Of course, if you present results of your work to beginner number of people, the level of criticism will be higher. It's up to you to decide to accept it or to ignore it. However, we recommend that you learn how to deal with criticism and how to understand what commentaries may improve the quality of your writing and which of them do not deserve your attention.  

Over time, you will see that work with criticism brings you much pleasure. Perhaps, you will even ask your readers to write comments where they tell you everything they think about you and your writing!

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Comments
  • Christina Battons

    Thanks, Glenna for the comment. Glad the article liked you :)

    Yes, I agree with you that it's important to learn to detach from your own writing.

  • Glenna Mageau

    Hi Christina. Really good article. Another thing I would add to the list is also to learn to detach from your own writing. When others criticize it isn't about you yet we often take it personally. As you've pointed out, find out why they think what they do. There is definitely something to be learned through criticism and I think it's important we listen but as you've said its how we listen that matters and what we choose to learn from it. Thank you for sharing your tips.