Tag-team critiquing
Aug. 30th, 2009 02:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWhew.
A friend and I have just finished a grueling, nine-and-a-half-hour writing session.
What were we doing? Answering an e-mail.
My friend and I are both readers of a certain Internet shared writing universe. (Which one isn't important.) My friend felt the creator and main writer of said universe could stand to improve his writing in certain key areas, and was torn between wanting to suggest improvements and not wanting to be the cause of a flamewar.
Finally, he decided to go ahead and write the e-mail and post it to the list, and asked me to "back him up". But given that I didn't want to be the cause of a flamewar either, and I've always felt it best to "praise publicly, criticize privately," I had an idea: we could both write the e-mail together, and then I'd send it to both of them.
We wrote in EtherPad, a free collaborative web-based text editor that I've been using for collaborative writing ever since it became available. We prefaced our text with our handles in all caps to make it clear who was saying what, and we proceeded to reply to each other, reinforce each other's points, mildly disagree a time or two…it was great fun (even if it ended up being considerably longer than we expected when we started—it was kind of comprehensive).
So we sent it off, and the subject was quite startled but pleased to have the feedback, and pledged to reply in more detail as soon as he had the time. He had the time today (or, rather, yesterday now). And did indeed reply in detail.
So today we sat down, and I did a "view original" in Gmail, copied and pasted the original text into emacs, did a search-and-replace to add an extra layer of "> " quoting, and we went through and trimmed quoted text and interspersed our replies, clarifying our original points, just like in any old-fashioned e-mail client.
We did…nine and a half hours of this. We…had quite a lot to say, and we're quite glad to have gotten it off of our chests.
All the same, at this point I can only hope that the fellow we critiqued doesn't feel the need to reply in detail again. :P
A friend and I have just finished a grueling, nine-and-a-half-hour writing session.
What were we doing? Answering an e-mail.
My friend and I are both readers of a certain Internet shared writing universe. (Which one isn't important.) My friend felt the creator and main writer of said universe could stand to improve his writing in certain key areas, and was torn between wanting to suggest improvements and not wanting to be the cause of a flamewar.
Finally, he decided to go ahead and write the e-mail and post it to the list, and asked me to "back him up". But given that I didn't want to be the cause of a flamewar either, and I've always felt it best to "praise publicly, criticize privately," I had an idea: we could both write the e-mail together, and then I'd send it to both of them.
We wrote in EtherPad, a free collaborative web-based text editor that I've been using for collaborative writing ever since it became available. We prefaced our text with our handles in all caps to make it clear who was saying what, and we proceeded to reply to each other, reinforce each other's points, mildly disagree a time or two…it was great fun (even if it ended up being considerably longer than we expected when we started—it was kind of comprehensive).
So we sent it off, and the subject was quite startled but pleased to have the feedback, and pledged to reply in more detail as soon as he had the time. He had the time today (or, rather, yesterday now). And did indeed reply in detail.
So today we sat down, and I did a "view original" in Gmail, copied and pasted the original text into emacs, did a search-and-replace to add an extra layer of "> " quoting, and we went through and trimmed quoted text and interspersed our replies, clarifying our original points, just like in any old-fashioned e-mail client.
We did…nine and a half hours of this. We…had quite a lot to say, and we're quite glad to have gotten it off of our chests.
All the same, at this point I can only hope that the fellow we critiqued doesn't feel the need to reply in detail again. :P
