The Scalpel and the Sledgehammer

There's Fighting Words at the End

I have to be honest with you: Due to an astonishing confluence of coincidences I won’t bore you with, there was almost no Shelf Life today. But then I remembered all two of you who read this and I thought—no, I cannot let them down. I have not been getting a lot done lately but I got this done and, from your perspective, that’s all that matters.

I was proud of myself for today’s article title which scans similarly to “The Owl and the Pussycat,” but only if you pronounce owl as two syllables (like au̇-əl), which I do, instead of as one syllable (like au̇l), which Edward Lear does. You can tell by how he fits the word into the anapestic meter. Incidentally, this is the same method by which we know Byron pronounced “Don Juan” as “dän JÜ wən” and not “dän WÄN” (he rhymes it with things like “new one” and “true one”).

My parents paid thousands of dollars for me to learn this.

Today’s Shelf Life is about a topic that applies to the writing craft, namely, critiquing the writing of others. If you’re a writer you will definitely be doing some of this. Critiquing the work of others is, first of all, the best way to get those others to critique your work in turn; but also, critiquing the work of others is a great way to hone your own writing. You really pick up a lot of valuable experience reading and critiquing other peoples’ stuff. I can’t recommend it enough.

So the scalpel-and-sledgehammer metaphor I’m going to trot out works on that level but also for delivering critiques of other kinds, like when you need to evaluate work performance or review a business (or another writer’s book). It’s great for delivering all kinds of feedback.

The main principles are: 

• Deliver criticism with a scalpel: be precise, elegant, and sparing 

• Deliver praise with a sledgehammer: bludgeon away

Spoiler alert, I’m going to relate this to the concept of the compliment sandwich so if that came to mind, hang in there. It’s on the way. Or maybe you’re just hungry and thinking of sandwiches.

Here is the reason behind this methodology: If someone is already doing something well, you don’t need to give them as much detailed feedback on that as you do on something that they are not doing well. You can just hit them hard with broad comments like “this dialogue is really great” or “the worldbuilding is done really well here.” They don’t need specifically actionable feedback because the message is “keep doing this.” Because they have already done it, you can assume they know how to do it—or, if they did it by accident (I do things in writing by accident all the time), at least they can review and reverse engineer it—and you can simply let them know they should do this thing some more.

When someone does something less well, specific and actionable feedback is the way to go. For one thing, when you go in with a scalpel you only slice the part of the patient you intend to slice. When you do surgery with a sledgehammer you’re going to damage everything in the vicinity of where you need to make the incision, because a sledgehammer can’t be used with that level of precision. I’m putting this next on a separate line because it’s that important:

Editors and critique partners, like doctors and witches, must first do no harm.

First do no harm. This is something they teach you when you start out in editing: Every time you make an edit you run the risk of inserting an error, and you have no way to know if the error you accidentally created is better or worse than the author’s original error. One of the first things I was trained to do as an editor was to check my own work meticulously to make sure I did not introduce an error where I was trying to improve something.

First do no harm. When you are critiquing someone’s writing, you are working on something they have invested their ego in. Nobody enjoys being told that work they’re proud of could use improvement. Not everyone takes criticism the same way, either: Some people will take it in stride, some people will take it with a little huff, and some people won’t take it at all. Some people will shut down at the sound of criticism and either give up on themself, or give up on seeking feedback (either from you or in general). This is to say, not everyone has the same level of emotional tolerance for criticism.

It’s normal for people to have different levels of emotional tolerance for stuff. My emotional tolerance for the song “Fast Car” is like negative twelve but other people seem to enjoy listening to it.

When you are delivering criticism, you do not want to bludgeon the recipient. You also don’t want to hit all the surrounding tissue with your sledgehammer when you were aiming for a very specific spot; isolate the damage as you would with a scalpel. An exaggerated example is if a piece has some stuff that’s working and some stuff that’s not, telling the author “this manuscript is awful” or “this manuscript is not publication-quality” damages everything, your criticism sticks to every part of the manuscript, and not just the stuff that’s not working.

A less-exaggerated example is something like “the dialogue needs work.” What, all the dialogue? What’s wrong with it? Is it not realistic? Not snappy enough? Too snappy? Not age-appropriate for the characters speaking it? Everyone talking with the same voice? There are a million things that could be wrong with dialogue. If you just tell the writer “your dialogue’s bad” then, first of all, they have only the faintest clue where to start, but more to the point, they may come away from that criticism feeling like “okay, I’m just bad at dialogue.” Well, dialogue’s a pretty big part of writing to just “be bad” at.

When you deliver criticism, like when you operate on a patient with a scalpel, you want to be as specific as you can. Don’t damage the surrounding areas if you can avoid it. This is where you want to devote the most of your brain energy in a critique, in my opinion at least, to making sure the feedback you give is explicit, detailed, and says exactly what you mean (even if you have to use some extra words to make sure the point goes home).

When you deliver praise with a sledgehammer, you also run the risk of hitting all the surrounding tissue—there’s a chance the recipient of your feedback package will overlook your precise criticism in favor of your less-specific praise. There is always a chance the recipient will consider the whole package and decide to interpret it as “overall good feedback, my story is great.” 

However, that’s not a reason not to praise with a sledgehammer. When someone solicits critique from you, they are requesting helpful critical feedback. That is what they are seeking. That’s the purpose of requesting critique of your writing. If they elect to take away only validation and not the critical feedback, chances are their request for critique was disingenuous in the first place. In my experience there are many writers who request critique or beta read and then express shock and dismay when their critical feedback arrives. There’s nothing you can do if someone wants validation but asks for critique.

When my personal friends ask me to read something for them, this is why I always ask if they want a critique or are they looking for more of a thumbs-up-or-thumbs-down type of response. If someone really just wants to hear “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it,” I can fulfill that wish.

What about the compliment sandwich? I have talked about the compliment sandwich in Shelf Life before (Delivering Criticism With Grace and Kindness) but I’m prepared to talk about it some more because now I have sandwiches on the brain.

I think the compliment sandwich can be an effective method of delivering criticism in a palatable way for people who are sensitive to criticism. The idea is you tell them the good stuff (compliment bread slice), and then you tell them your critical stuff (the filling of the sandwich), and then you finish up with some more good stuff (the bookending compliment bread slice).

When you eat a sandwich, the bread part of it is delicious and the filling part of it is delicious, and while the bread is not exactly nutritious and the filling hopefully is, you enjoy eating the sandwich as a whole. When you make a sandwich, you are not hiding a filling you don’t want to eat between two appetizing slices of bread. When you make a sandwich, it’s because you enjoy the filling and you want to eat it.

The idea behind the compliment sandwich as it is commonly used is more like hiding ground up spinach in brownies to get your toddler to eat a vegetable. The idea is that the criticism is unpleasant but necessary and to make it easier to swallow you’re going to surround it with compliments.

I prefer a different food metaphor for delivering criticism, which is a salad.

When you eat a salad, you put salad dressing (compliments) on the salad greens (criticism) to make the nutritious part of the salad more fun to eat. Look, we all know that salad greens are just a vehicle for getting salad dressing into your mouth because society says you can’t pour the dressing right down your gullet. We live in a culture that demands you put it on a vegetable first (even if that vegetable is a french fry). There are people who will tell you that, no, eating salad does not require fun dressing and you can just eat those salad greens and enjoy them but those people are lying.

The salad greens, which equal the criticism in this metaphor, are delivering the bulk of the nutrition. They’re good for you, and while not always delicious on their own, they help you grow big and strong. The salad dressing, which is the praise in this metaphor, tastes delicious and frankly it’s not that bad for you especially if you’re balancing it out with salad greens, but it’s not particularly nutritious so you don’t want to fill up on it. Splash it all over, be liberal with it, make sure it’s distributed through the salad, but recognize it for what it is—encouragement.

The problem with the compliment sandwich is people use it to cop out of delivering real criticism. What they end up doing is coming up with insincere and unhelpful compliments as an afterthought to try to soften harsh criticism (“I really liked the opening line; the plot and characterization are trash and need work; but you know what was nice, the character names were excellent”) or they load up on nothing but compliments and then sneak a quick little criticism in there hoping the recipient won’t notice and get their feelings hurt (“oh my gosh this story was so amazing, I loved everything about it! Except the plot was a bit thin and the characters were flat but overall just brilliant, really, your work is so good!”).

Make a compliment salad and not a compliment sandwich. Salads are better than sandwiches anyway; fight me.

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