Week 8 Comments and Feedback

This week, I continue looking back on my progress in the class so far. The topic is on Feedback and Commenting, where I will analyze the comments I have received, the comments I have given, the blog comments in particular, and a plan moving forwards.

First, on the comments that I have received. In general, I enjoy seeing the reactions to my stories just for the sake of reactions. The comments that are most helpful are the honest ones, as they focus on some random detail of the story and run with it. This generally helps the story writing process, and I enjoy getting ideas from these small and innocuous details. As per my comment wall, I liked seeing the anticipation for the story on Indra, but more importantly, I enjoyed seeing the overall opinion of the story to see which one people were looking forwards to the most.

As per the comments I give out, I have tried to read the stories, type a comment, re-read the story, then refine the comment. In general, I get hung up on a detail or two within the story, and I use that to drive my questions. In addition, I'm a real sucker for good exposition, so when people set up stories well and help me feel the emotions and imagery of the story, I try to let them know as I believe that is a hard skill to attain.

On the subject of blog comments in particular, I try to read the blog comments around once per week. The shorter blog comments generally have more content within the words, but the lengthier ones have their merits as well. The blog is the main site of feedback that I have gotten outside of the emails. While the emails are a strong, in depth source of feedback, they are more focused on getting items accomplished. The blog comments generally give a general idea of moving forward, but leave a decent amount of freedom.

Moving forwards, I hope to re-read the comments that I have received so that I can refine my story telling process and improve my writing. There is an important part of the feedback process where we do not just blindly accept the suggestions of others and instead, we choose to buffer them against our own interests, so I will have to keep that in mind. I have chosen the image below because I believe that it highlights this principle. Feedback is a two way street that should generally be seen as mutually beneficial.

The Feedback Process is about refining, but not changing. Source: GrowthMindsetMemes

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