Feedback is not a power trip

“Are you Katy’s little sister?” “Are you related to Katy?” “You look just like Katy!” I heard these comments for much of my early life. It wasn’t until I spent a year in France after high school, on my own, no family with me or gone before me where I was staying, that I realized it was possible for me to be me without my older sister as reference point. That year, I stepped out of the shadow of comparison and came into my own.

An associate of mine told me of a horrible experience she had had with a professional writer whose feedback to her on a short story was, “This is terrible writing. You may as well give up right now.” My associate put down her pen for several years before having the courage to once more pick it up, and it took more time still before she dared share her writing with anyone for feedback.

When I was about 11, my French teacher was Monsieur Caillé. I loved him more for his red hair and beautifully groomed beard than I did for his classes, but when my best friend’s mother told me that he had told her that I could be really good in French if only I applied myself a bit more, I committed to proving him right by starting to pay attention and do the work. Monsieur Caillé’s challenge, cleverly delivered by a trusted proxy, had its desired effect and I still speak French today.

My post last week and the one on Brevity Blog have generated interesting conversations in some of my circles. Feedback is not a benign issue, nor, it seems, is giving it a commonly held skill. Many of us have been scarred by it — either for how it was delivered, or who delivered it, or for the timing of it. Enter “feedback” into Google Scholar and you get more than seven million hits in less than a nano second — lots of research and writing about feedback exists out there. The Feedback Fallacy was sent to me by a reader, who argued with me that critical feedback is not helpful, only positive and encouraging comments are helpful to a writer. I politely disagreed. I want feedback, but it must be offered for my needs not for the giver's; frequently the deliverer of the feedback is stroking their own ego by tearing down the recipient's. That is not feedback; that is a power trip. 

At its best, feedback is a measured exchange between partners in a process, between collaborators in a mutually interesting project, between individuals who respect each other’s perspective. At its worst, of course, feedback is comparative: Your writing is not like mine, therefore I will edit it to be like mine. Or it is judgemental, abusing the vulnerability of the recipient: Your writing would be better if you did X or Y or maybe didn’t write at all, ever again. Or it is encouraging and, in a good way, challenging: Your story is intriguing; have you considered what might happen if you introduced the dog earlier into the narrative?

At its root, feedback is communication, and very few of us are masters of that. Oral communication is tricky because 58 percent of our message comes from the non-verbal cues we give, while 35 percent comes from the tone of voice we use, and only seven percent comes from the words themselves. Translate this to written communication and, I would argue, that when it comes to feedback it’s even more fraught: Unless we include emojis (and who really knows what that smiley face with the tongue hanging out actually means?), our feedback is received via only the words on the page or screen. The tone must be carefully crafted and the words well chosen or it will all be either misunderstood or rejected.

Feedback can be fraught, yet, in my view, it is essential for our professional and our personal growth. The fortunate among us have a trusted and skilled collaborator (def. 'someone who works jointly with others') on whom we can rely for both clarity and care when their feedback comes our way.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash