If you’re like us, you don’t always enjoy getting feedback on your writing. Revising it is also the worst. You’d rather just sit down, write something beautiful, have everyone tell you it’s beautiful, and applaud yourself for being so eloquent and creating something beautiful. We get it.

As we are both slowly and painfully learning (one of us cried two days ago after getting feedback on our poem), we all need feedback. The best authors are constantly seeking feedback and doing revisions based on that feedback, which is no coincidence. Seeking and receiving feedback is one of the most important parts of the writing process, and the people who are best at it are also the best writers.

In their classic book A Community of Writers: A Workshop Course in Writing, authors Peter Elbow and Patricia Belanoff give some extremely useful tips for how to approach receiving productive feedback from those you share your writing with. This could be friends, family, a workshop group, classmates, etc. Of all their advice, three tips stood out most to me.

Here are 3 quick tips for getting feedback on your writing:

1. Ask your readers to point out parts of your manuscript that stuck out to them. If you’re especially shy about receiving feedback on your work, start with something like this. Understanding which parts of your work have an impact on people (positive or negative) can allow you to see it through others’ eyes for a moment. You can work on developing these parts. 
2. Ask readers to summarize what they’ve read. This allows you to get a feel for whether or not your readers understood what you wanted them to. What did they feel like was the “main thing” in your manuscript? What did they miss in their summary that you could go back and clarify?
3. Come with specific questions to ask your readers. After you’ve gone back over your manuscript, highlight anything you want to ask your readers about. Consider the following questions as a starting point – What did you think about this section? Is this sentence effective? What parts feel long to you? What could be expanded upon? Having specific questions in mind allows you to have some sort of control over the feedback you receive, which can make the whole process a lot less scary.

There are several other suggestions covered in Elbow & Belanoff’s book that we would highly recommend looking through. Feedback from trusted readers is necessary to improve your work AND it doesn’t have to be scary, especially when you receive it intentionally. 

You’ve got this.