The Complete Writer:
The Ultimate Guide to Writing, Publishing, and Leading the Writer’s Life
Chapter 9
Revising with Reader Feedback
Many professional and would-be professional authors work with a beta reader: a nonprofessional reader who agrees to review and comment on a work, for little or no pay. Ideally, the beta reader should represent a fairly typical member of the work’s audience: she or he should share cultural values, interests, and socioeconomic status with the kind of people who could be expected to read the story or book.
One advantage of using a beta-reader or friend—as opposed to an editor or a teacher—is that you can control the amount of feedback you get and when you get it. If you have plenty of time and you have the temperament for it, recruiting someone to read and comment on your work early on can be very useful; it also provides you with comments during several stages of the process, as you work through your thinking on a subject.
You don’t have to restrict yourself to one reader—Peter Elbow recommends two or even three people. It’s important to bear in mind, though, that you may have to coach your reader by asking very specific questions, and sometimes by interrupting him or her at set points in the reading and asking for certain responses as they proceed. This is time-consuming.
Who can these readers be? Some people would never allow their spouses to read their work; others would never let anyone other than a spouse read an early draft.
A writer’s workshop can be a source of beta readers—people who are committed to writing have enough interest in the process to enjoy reading and replying to you.
If you take writing courses, classmates may be helpful, since they allegedly understand an assignment; if you find willing readers in a college course, make friends now and don’t lose track of these folks! Adult children, if they’re far enough beyond adolescence to see you as a human being, may be helpful. And you might consider trusted friends, co-workers, or brothers and sisters, assuming the subject doesn’t treat certain issues in a way that might blindside or hurt them.
Parents are a lot like spouses—too close to you, and you have to keep on living with them.
Whomever you select, the advantage of talking the story over with someone else is that it gives you an opportunity to re-envision the subject and its treatment in a new light—to see it through someone else’s eyes.
Your needs, your temperament, and the time available to you determine how much feedback you will seek:
Minimal feedback: At the very least, get some help in eliminating errors in grammar and usage from a final draft that needs to be very polished.
A little feedback: You don’t have much time, or for whatever reason you don’t need a thorough critique You ask the reader to look for spelling, grammar, and usage errors, and for any awkward or unclear sentences. Though you don’t want to involve yourself in ornate discussions, you’d like to know if there are any places where you sound like an idiot. You get one round of feedback at the end, and that’s it. In spite of this determination, you can still benefit:
This kind of feedback can help you revise clumsy language or language, restructure ideas, clarify or explain points; change tone of voice; insert transitions or introductions to help retain the reader’s attention.
Medium feedback: You don’t want to rethink your whole position, but you’re willing to consider major revisions of structure and strategy. You take the opportunity to understand what is confusing or bothersome to a reader and revise accordingly.
Lots of feedback: Everything is open for discussion, from start to finish.
Decide how much of this process you want to buy into.
Working with a reader who is a friend and not, like a teacher or editor, an imagined “adversary,” can build confidence and clarity, and help you cut through the abstraction.
Elbow describes two kinds of reader feedback: what he calls “criterion-based” and “reader-based.” Let’s review the high points of these
Criterion-based response
This is the schoolmarm stuff: basic qualities of content, organization, language, and usage. Solicit comments in these four basic categories:
- The content of the writing: Ask the reader about quality of the ideas, the perceptions, and the point of view. Is your basic idea or insight valid? Do you support your point by logical reasoning and valid argument? Does the reader feel your support includes evidence and examples, and are you’re really making good points ?
- The organization. Ask about the work’s unity, whether the parts are arranged in a coherent or logical way, whether the beginning, middle, and end hold together, and whether paragraphs seem coherent and logical.
- Effectiveness of the language: Ask whether the sentences are clear and readable, and whether the word usage seems correct. Does it sound like correct English?
- The correctness and appropriateness of the usage: How are the grammar, usage, spelling, typing, and style?
Reader-based response
In Elbow’s world, eliciting a response to writing boils down to three basic questions designed to test how your words affect the person who reads them:
- What happened to you, moment by moment, as you were reading the writing?
- Summarize the writing: what does it say or what happened in it?
- Make some images for the writing and the transaction it creates with readers.
It’s important to know what is going on inside the reader’s mind and heart. Some people have enough insight to recognize and articulate their reactions as they read a work. But many people find it difficult to describe what’s going on in their minds as they’re reading.
So, you need to elicit these reactions by careful questioning. To find out what was happening to the reader, ask him or her to read just a couple of paragraphs. Elbow posits these questions:
- What was happening as you read the opening passages?
- What words struck you most?
- What impression did you get of the writer?
Have the person continue reading, maybe marking the manuscript with notes or lines. Half or three-quarters of the way through the piece, ask again what is happening with the reader, with questions like these:
- Please narrate your response to everything in detail, even if it seems irrelevant.
- Has your attitude has changed since you began reading—for example, were with the writer at the start and now opposed? Why?
- Please point out passages that you liked and ones you didn’t understand or resisted.
- What do you think will happen next?
After the reader has finished the document, again ask what is happening:
- What is your reaction?
- What seems the most important thing about the piece?
- How would you describe the ending—is it abrupt, warm? unnoticeable? other?
- What aspects of the reader does the piece bring out—a contemplative side? curiosity? helpfulness? other?
Finally, ask the person to reflect on the piece and talk about its implications. If you can, get the person to read it again and report the differences between what happens on the second and the first reading.
Ask the person to give a very quick, informal summary, and then to summarize what she thinks the writer is trying to say but not quite succeeding. A reader’s summary of the writing gives you a lot of insight into how well your meaning is understood.
A third useful exercise is to ask the reader to devise some images for the writing and for the way it affects him or her. Don’t push the person too hard to explain or interpret the imagery; take it instead as a clue to the direction and effect of the writing.
A variety of questions can elicit this kind of response. Ask the person what other writing it reminds you of—what forms of writing: film? departmental memo? journal entry? love letter? Ask the person how someone else might respond to it—how would his mother like it, or some mutual acquaintance. How does the person view the relationship between writer and reader—familiar? distant? reading from a stage? shaking his fist? Is the writing trying to do something to the reader, like beat her over the head or trick her or make her like the writer? Ask the reader to describe the tone or voice—is it intimate, shouting, jokey, tense, other? Try asking the person to describe the writing in terms of other media—does the camera move in, fade back, create foreground or background, other? Draw a picture of what you see or think.
Working with a beta reader has a number of advantages:
- Because you have to give the reader time to think about the copy, it forces you to start on the work well in advance of the deadline.
- It makes you slow down and think about your work carefully before you consider it “finished.”
- It lets you see how well your message is understood by a real reader.
- It allows you to think of your work as open to change.
- It gives you new insights.