Feedback Focus: Week 4

So I’ve tried these three ways of reading with the goal of providing more insightful feedback and personally I think that reading aloud is definitely the best option when possible. It helps you notice little things that might sound off that you may not have noticed when just reading it on the page. If there’s some phrasing that screws up the flow, you notice it immediately, or if there’s a misplaced word, it sticks out like a sore thumb when you’re reading aloud.

I’m not a huge fan of the timer method in general. It feels a bit too formulaic and doesn’t allow as much space for creativity or changes in materials. Sometimes I find that I’ll spend more time with a material than another to really feel like I have the same level of understanding. The same goes for feedback. Sometimes I spend longer to say less or sometimes I spend a very short time saying quite a bit. The flow can vary quite a bit in either case. This method can be nice in some ways because it gives you some strict guidelines to follow and helps you stay on take but it just lacks the needed creative variance that good feedback has.

The copy and delete method just seemed odd to me. I guess it could help some people by reducing the influence of formatting, but I haven’t really had that problem. Overall, it seemed like a pretty lackluster method for me personally.

The biggest reading technique I use is trying to read with an editor’s eye – ask what could make this piece better? When you’re reading the piece to try and understand it from the writer’s perspective so that you can best understand it, you can give really good feedback to help the author improve their piece.

(Editing, flickr)