Handling Criticism of Your Blog's Articles ~ BLOGGER HEROE

While the Internet has brought the world closer together in many regards, it has also allowed people to create protective shells around themselves that allow those people to avoid any criticism, even worthwhile criticism. This is not a good thing for a writer. If you start blogging, you’re going to get criticism of your writing. Don’t think that turning off your comments section is going to eliminate this. People will just email you if they’re highly motivated to contest something that you said in an article or to criticize your writing otherwise. If you plan on being a professional writer and making money off your blog, you have to depersonalize this criticism and learn to take it for what it’s worth.

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Trolls

One of the most important things about working with criticism is learning to separate the useful from the useless. Trolls are people who offer useless criticism. This is criticism that is merely designed to disparage you, to make you feel unworthy or to elicit a hostile reaction from you.

The best thing you can do with trolls is learn to laugh at what they say and then just completely ignore them. If somebody has proven themselves to be a troll, go ahead and kick them off your blog and block their email address. They have nothing interesting to say and you have better things to do with your time than listen to them spout off.

Professional Critics

The term “professional critics” is being used sarcastically in this sense. If you actually have caught the attention of professional critics and they’ve written about your writing, congratulations, you’ve actually made it somewhere.

You’re going to run into people on the Internet who think that they’re professional critics but who are not. These are the types of people who have enough time on their hands to give you long and rambling critiques of every single thing you write but who really have nothing to say. Watch out for phrases such as “As a writer myself,” or “I have been writing for X amount of years”. These are called appeals to authority. They are intended to lend weight to the criticism that the person is throwing your way. Actual professionals, if they need to establish their credentials, will show you what they do rather than telling you about it. In fact, any writer worth his or her salt will tell you that it’s much better to show than to tell and that philosophy is equally useful in fiction and real life.

Good Critics

Now that you’ve gotten some idea of what kind of people you can safely ignore on the Internet, there are some people that will have very good criticism of your writing that you should pay attention to. These people will typically not go out of their way to insult you and, in fact, they’ll try to deliver their criticism with a great deal of constructive advice or with genuinely curious questions about your writing.

Here’s a good example. Somebody reads an article you wrote about WordPress templates but there’s something in your article that they’re not clear about. Instead of just pointing out the lack of clarity, they ask you to be more specific about what you are saying and, in one very socially graceful move, they do criticize your writing for lack of clarity but also give you an opportunity to clarify and they show genuine interest in what you wrote. These types of criticisms are the ones you need to pay attention to. They’re the ones that are usually called feedback, but they actually are criticism, in many instances. If you can learn to pay attention to the good criticism you get, your writing will improve by leaps and bounds and your blog will be more useful to everybody who reads it.

Guest Author

About The Author

Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress templates, that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.

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