Most of you who belong to writer's groups have had the uncomfortable experience of bringing a piece of work to the group for a critique where everyone says, "Boy, that's a great piece of writing." You walk out wondering if anyone read what you wrote. Those of you who haven't endured the platitudes have probably had the experience of walking into a group that tears your piece to shreds, leaving you bloody in an alley after the meeting, wondering why you ever learned to print, much less write, and yet having the feeling that they missed the point.

Is there a right way to critique? Yes! And again, Yes! The crowd is silent, dubious. But there is a right way to critique.

It takes a leap of faith to believe that you can tell a writer something she doesn't know about her own work, but that is the point of a critique, and the only reason to belong to a writer's group. It's the only reason to go to a writing class. It's the only way to learn to write. To improve your writing, you must find someone who can tell you how to make your work better. The value of a writing group is measured by the ability of the members to do just that. If you learn the skills of critical reading, you can help others to write better, and take those skills home and apply them to your own work.

I'll talk primarily about criticizing poetry, but many of the same principles apply to prose, and where there are significant differences, I'll try to point them out.

First, the point of a critique is to help a writer to make a piece of work stronger. In order to do that, your responsibility is to point out what works and what doesn't work for you. Praise by itself doesn't help, nor does nit-picking. I'll give you a list of questions to answer to yourself as you read a piece for criticism, and answering as many as you can may help you and the author understand the work better.

The ability to do a critique depends upon the ability to read critically, and to compare the work with your own body of knowledge. It helps to read a lot in your genre, and to read the classics. It also helps to pick up a good book or two on the mechanics of writing: something that describes the classic poetic forms, with a good discussion of rhyme and meter and language, if you're most interested in poetry. If you write novels or short stories, read about plot, character, setting, pacing and story structure. In any case, a copy of Strunk and White or some other manual of style is indispensable. If you know your publisher, you can use the specific manual to which that publisher subscribes.

Here goes.

Read the work, and enjoy it. Read it a second time, more carefully. Try to understand what the author was trying to do in the piece. What is the structure? Is it free verse? Rhymed verse? Is there meter? How many stanzas? Are they regular? Is this a classic verse form? Note internal rhymes and partial rhythms and meters in free verse. How is the poem punctuated, and are the punctuation choices consistent throughout? How is the poem laid out on the page? Is the layout an important part of the poem? For prose, you can also note structure. Is it a single scene, or a story made up of several scenes? If there are several scenes, what is their relationship, and their relative lengths? Is the pacing compelling in a short story or novel? Does it pull you along? Does the story build to classic climax/denouement structure? What are the conflicts that drive the plot or motivate change in the character in a short story or novel (both the internal and external ones, because if a story is a compelling one, there are often both)? Are the issues that compelled the action resolved? Where does the tension come from in any work, whether poem, fiction, or creative non-fiction?

Who tells the story or narrates the poem. Is it first person? Third person? Omniscient? Even second person is acceptable, though it brings special problems of its own. Does the POV work with the material? Is the point of view consistent? One of the most common errors of beginning poets and writers is shifting POV in the middle of the piece. One way this commonly happens is a shift from first person to an omniscient narrator filling in some bit of crucial data, or commenting on the action. Watch for it near the climax.

Begin your critique with the details we've discussed; a very basic summary of the structure of the work.

"This is a set of rhymed quatrains in iambic pentameter with an omniscient narrator . . ."

Now you can begin paragraph two of a good critique: tell the author what you understand of what the poem or story means. Give a brief (one short paragraph) statement of the plot and the theme. If the poem has layers of meaning to it, say so. Are there important recurring themes, metaphors or images in the piece? Telling the author the plot (and especially the theme) may seem redundant, but it lets her know you've read the story with care, and that what she wanted to say came through the paper to a reader. If the plot seems too linear, or predictable, say so tactfully, but say so. If some of the images aren't fresh ones, say so. On the other hand, be generous with praise if an image or an element in the structure strikes you as particularly apt or creative.

If you read the story carefully and what the author wanted to say wasn't there, she needs to know. I for one have had the experience of making my surprise twist at the climax of a short story "too subtle." Subtle is great, but too subtle means an audience of one.

Does the form and the choice of narrator work with the content, or against it? An omniscient narrator distances you (the reader) from the character, but often works better for poems and stories that are plot or theme driven. A first person narrator brings you right there, into the character, and may be very effective in emotionally driving home a flawed narrator, but often doesn't work with a formal poetry style. This is where you tell the author about any lapses in POV you noticed above.

Language is next. Read the work again. This time, read part or all of the piece out loud. How do the words and sentences fall from your tongue? Is the sentence structure awkward or convoluted? Are there phrases that sound stilted, or could be shortened or omitted without harming the meaning? Is there a nice rhythm to the whole, or is the sentence structure or word choice monotonous? Are the verb choices passive or active? Are they colorful, or flat? Does the author use too many adverbs (a common problem for beginners and writers of some genre fiction)?

Word choice is important, both to rhythm and to the feel of a piece. A poem has a different feel depending on whether you choose long words or short, latinate (venison) or germanic (deer).

As an interesting exercise in how sentence structure and content can work together, read a Hemingway short story, or anything by E. Annie Proulx. You can find what not to do in almost anything by Anne Rice, for my money. Does the language work with the content? I recently read a wonderful personal essay on mother-daughter relationships where the narrator started off sounding like Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. Is the dialogue realistic? Can you hear the characters speak the words, and are the tone and the voice consistent?

That is the meat of a critique. We've addressed the major issues of style and content. All that's left is housekeeping. Housekeeping is checking for spelling, grammar, syntax, and punctuation. Do this with a light touch, and realize that some violations of grammar, syntax, or punctuation may be intentional. Still, if you're not sure, or if you don't think that "stylistic choice" works, mention it in your comments. I'll end with a brief critique of an early version of one of my own poems, originally e-published in MUSE.

Easter still life, with Poet

He came into the town--more of a village, really--on the back of an ass,
and the people waived palm fronds, and called him
King of the Palms
a coconut, a date in the new mythology.
The rustle of palm fronds woke me this morning
like a hesitation in the smooth buzz of an airplane engine
like a skipped heartbeat, and the eternity before the next one
an ass, they said, or maybe it was a Honda Civic.
Something small, and without a conscience.
Baalam's ass didn't have a conscience, either.
The ass performed a function, like all asses,
and as Baalam's conscience, perhaps it carried a load that Baalam could not.
The room was filled with smoke, and jazz, and palm fronds
and there was a bowl of dates sugared on the table
drinks, with coconut and 141 rum
and I knew I was sitting across from an ass.

Critique

Free verse. 16 lines without stanza breaks. There is no predominant meter. Punctuation and capitalization are fairly conventional, though punctuation isn't carried through consistently. The poem has a first person narrator discussing both external events and his or her reaction to them

The title, "Easter still life, with Poet," brings with it the image of a painting of inanimate objects, one with religious overtones, and a poet as one of the inanimate objects. The first image in the poem begins to follow through with this promise, and we have a narrator discussing an unidentified person-possibly the poet, coming into a village on the back of an ass, and being greeted with palm fronds, like Jesus entering Jerusalem. But the figure seems faintly ridiculous--"a coconut, a date." In the next four lines, the narrator discusses his (?her--it's not clear) reaction to the sound of the palm fronds; a startle like that caused by an absence of sound--a life threatening absence--that of a heart beat skipping or an aircraft engine skipping. These are strong images. We skip then to the ass from the first image, and expand on it, first comparing it to basic transportation, then stating that it doesn't have a conscience, whence Baalam's ass. This is an Old Testimate reference to the animal that balked at taking Baalam with the Moabites when it saw God's angels in the path, and when Baalam beat the animal for stopping, God spoke to Baalam through it and chided him.

We skip to a smoke-filled jazz bar, continuing the theme of palm fronds, dates and coconuts, and end with the knowledge that the narrator is sitting across from an ass. Ass here has to be the poet of the title, and the lines above have given the word connotations of a collective conscience, and of the vehicle Jesus used to enter Jerusalem, but it still says the man is a self-important ass. The poem pretty well deflates into a still life (or a poetic shaggy dog story) at that point, when it could have been more. Perhaps one way to avoid this fate would be to show us something concrete about the poet, if that is who the narrator faces.

Suggest dropping the "--more of a village--", it's weak, and if you mean village, say so.

Certainly, a period is indicated at the end of line 7, where the sentence logically ends, and one would consider a comma at the end of line 6, and a semicolon at the end of line 3.

All in all, there is a lot appealing about this poem, and it has the potential to be more than the still life/pun that it is.