h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Got an appointment at 10am, hunny

lil x

with it.

Thank you

Hope the meeting goes well - and have just read the relevant thread, hope it doesnt drive you out of commenting on peoples just because they disagree. If specialist knowledge was required on PR we wouldn't be able to check much. Or write much, I'm hardly an expert on Piracy

It won't stop me commenting in general. Just on some person's stuff.

I've more or less given up commenting in PR after someone objected, very vehemently, to the suggestions I'd made. Note, I made it very clear that they were SUGGESTIONS, not directives!
I wondered at the time why that person had bothered putting the item into PR if (s)he didn't weant anyone to comment on it.

... after all, we are all just volunteers!

True. I've hd similar in PR, too, at times, but I just don't bother with commenting on entries of the persons in question any more. It is fine to say "I don't like your suggestion", but it always depends on how somebody says it.

This author reacted the same way in Peer Review last time. And I *did* know what I was talking about. I just didn't get the "art", apparently.

Well, I guess what we learn is to either take the bull by the horns, like Sho, or give them a wide berth.

Unfortunately there is no way to predict whether the Researcher in question will take on board any suggestions or just take them as a negative criticism.

I want to see them submit more stuff for review because they *can* write really well but I can't think of a way to make it clear that the review fora aren't just there for 'experts' to stroke each other's egos.

I will hope that he submits more

I'm against letting any entry into PR that isn't the best that it could be, so if an entry by him appears into PR that i'm capable of talking about, then I'm likely to "take the bull by its horns" as said

To take up a point earlier on, I agree that non-experts should comment in PR - after all, it's the people who don't know about the subject that the entries are aimed at. If something is unclear to them, they should say so before it goes live.

OK I've tracked it down and read it.

here are my

From the poet's perspective if you come into the thread and say first that you're not a crit, and then suggest changing a word (and for me the word repetition works well, but it's not that long since I studided poetry) I can imagine that their first reaction is "WTF?"

however, going off on one like that isn't the right way to respond to someone who posted immediately the poem was put out there, because we all know that when someone puts something up for review they often sit there hitting the refresh button. So it's lovely that someone posts right away. Definitely it's not acceptable.

I saw that there was one post pretty quickly saying nearly that, which is how I think we should react to that.

Gno also made an excellent post in there, really it could be a template for what to say to people who are behaving badly.

But, Bel, I think you also should have said something - even if it's just: well, I know how important feedback is ...



But I really do firmly believe that if we remember that we're all human and all have good days and bad days we'd all get along a lot better.

oh and I agree with TC about PR definitely. But i'm not so sure when it comes to creative writing ... when I used to write poetry what I really wanted to know is - what do you think, how does the language (etc) speak to you.

of course this is the interweb and everyone's MMV

Thanks all.

I hadn't seen the subsequent posts by MVP and Gnomon, but I'm grateful for their nice words.

>>because we all know that when someone puts something up for review they often sit there hitting the refresh button<<

That was exactly the reason why I made an effort to post. The die-hard AWW submitters know it can take a while for responses, but the few of us who do comment stretch ourselves to be quick and welcoming for new people.

>>when I used to write poetry what I really wanted to know is - what do you think, how does the language (etc) speak to you.<<

Well, the language didn't work for me in this case. You don't want to know which mental image this poem brought up for me.

Which is exactly the sort of feedback a writer needs about a story or a poem.

Personally, I don't place too much stock in the label 'poet'. I think it's a relic from another era. You can write. You can express what you want to say in prose or verse. Different forms - different fictional genres, different essay-writing approaches, different verse types - have different disciplines. And they're all subject to experiment.

What I want to know in a workshop is not, did you like it? Are you in love with my idea/character/punchline? If I wanted to say it badly enough, it was important to me.

What I want to know is, what do you read when I write X? Can you see the character (even if you hate him)? Am I getting my point across, even if it makes you want to throw things at me?

We don't need to be authorities for each other - and we certainly don't want to dictate our friends' choice of subject matter. But we need to give an honest account of our reactions to the piece in question.

The rest is up to the author.

Last week, Elektra gave KB some feedback on his upcoming Guide Entry.

It went, 'KB, that entry of yours on the Tongue-Eating Louse gave me a nightmare...'

I wonder though.

Poetry is a bit special in a lot of respects. It's like me showing stuff to my Gruesomes and they say "that's not poetry, it doesn't even rhyme" - and then we get into the whole thing of repetition, balance, meter, internal rhyme until they want to stab themselves in the ears.

Anyway - it's all a learning process for all of us, isn't it?

Sho, maybe that's because in German we differentiate between Gedicht and Lyrik*?


*Lyrik is the sort of poetry nobody understands. And it certainly doesn't rhyme.

All art forms are subjective, poetry more so than most. And whereas repetition is a legitimate poetic device, just because a word repeats in a poem doesn't mean the poet intended it to do so as a device. Only the poet knows that for sure. So the response to Bel's remark should have been to say, yeah I know it repeats. That's what I wanted. Going off in a snit wasn't the answer.