My best friend Andy is rumored to have once said, “People always say, ‘I am my own worst critic.’ Well I’m not. August is my worst critic.”<\/p>\n
I take no small pride in my critiquing skills. When it comes to words, I have an eye for detail. Shifting through pages and pages of small type looking for mistakes is something I find enjoyable. Finding errors in writing is like getting a shot of dopamine. It probably says something negative about me that I enjoy finding other people’s mistakes, but I’ll take my pleasures where I can get them.<\/p>\n
When critiquing, it’s all too easy to be mean. There’s a certain satisfaction gained from being an asshole about other people’s mistakes. Often I find it necessary to reign that in. Not because I’m worried about hurt feelings, but because being a jerk isn’t the most effective way to edit. If the goal is improving the work, I find it best to be as neutral as possible.
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\nFinding the typos and punctuation errors is easy. It does very little good to just proofread and call it a day though. The real joy of critiquing is improving on the work itself. The goal is to learn what they are trying to say, and help them say it better.<\/p>\n
When it comes to my own work, I actually enjoy the editing process more then the writing process. Creating something from nothing is hard. The effort required to write something new, whether a fifty thousand word novel or a three hundred word blog post, can be exhausting.<\/p>\n
I find it much easier to take something already formed and mold it into a more pleasing shape. Easier and more satisfying. It’s like any other work of art. It’s relatively easy to sculpt a person. It’s harder, more detailed work, to add the features that bring it to life.<\/p>\n
I prefer the detail work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My best friend Andy is rumored to have once said, “People always say, ‘I am my own worst critic.’ Well I’m not. August is my worst critic.” I take no small pride in my critiquing skills. When it comes to words, I have an eye for detail. Shifting through pages and pages of small type […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[242,330],"class_list":["post-7766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-critiquing","tag-editting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}