Welcome to Camp Cadets!

Our goal as far as feedback goes is to both deliver and receive top-notch constructive feedback, which is why we have this university to highlight what we expect and what we will not accept when you review as an absorber of the Golden Quill Society.

Giving feedback is about finding ways to suggest improvements, not declaring a work as 'bad', and walking away from it without sharing ideas and tips on how you think it can be improved.

All new members, upon acceptance into the club, are required to read through this chapter and provide feedback to the short story at the bottom of the chapter. You are to review it exactly how we will teach you here. Your review will be revised by the moderator and if it's up to par, you can join the current or next reviewing cycle.

To recap, clubbers are to leave at least two in-line comments and one end of chapter comment. If you're missing any of these in your reviews, it counts as incomplete which in turn counts as a strike.

When you critique a chapter, your job is to determine whether the writer accomplished what they set out to do in that chapter. You're mostly going to be working with a lot of work-in-progress and our goal as a book club is to help each other improve our work and have a winning bestseller in the end.

This brings us to language. How you say something is just as important as what you choose to say. Language and choice of words matter, they can easily turn constructive feedback into a destructive critic. Before you hit that post button, read your final feedback out loud to yourself, and make sure it's helpful, kind, and constructive.

Constructive criticism is designed to point out mistakes, and also show where and how improvements can be made. Constructive criticism is useful feedback that can help writers improve their work and that is what we do here. We can help each other without tearing each other down.

As absorbers of the Golden Quill Society, we need to learn to give and receive constructive feedback. Keep these two things in mind;

🍁 Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots.
🍁 Those who refuse to admit and see their mistakes can never grow.

Reading to critique is different from reading for pleasure. The primary difference is the level of analysis we bring to the work. As a reader, we might set aside a book that doesn't grab us. As a critiquer, we have an obligation to each other to figure out why the book isn't grabbing us.

For a critique, it's best to read the chapter at least twice: a quick run through that allows you to get a sense of the piece and its major strengths and weaknesses and a second, more careful, analytical read. Don't skim. Read deeply. Take notes. If you can't commit to this, don't give feedback.

It's important that you set aside your personal tastes and expectations. You may have preferences as a reader that is not related to the quality of a work. Just because you don't like reading novels written in the first person doesn't mean that the writer has gone astray. Keep in mind that you need to critique the work that is written, not the work you would have preferred had you written the story yourself.

Be specific with your feedback. If there's a line with grammar and structure error or plot holes that distract from the entire story, point it out using in-line comments and then expatiate on it in your final chapter review. Try to avoid criticizing elements if you cannot follow criticism with suggestions for improvement.

Feedback is really about the quality of your suggestions, not the quantity. If the writer's work needs proofreading, suggest a thorough line edit rather than picking at every little grammar, spelling, and punctuation nit. If passive voice or weak language choices are a theme,  recommend that the writer take a closer look at those things. A mountain of feedback, no matter how constructive, can be overwhelming.

If your overload of in-line comments are just you reacting to the story, go ahead enjoy. If it's you picking at every punctuation error or grammar error, reel it in a notch. Choose just a few things to focus on and be thorough in your discussion of them.

Most works on Wattpad are in the first draft stage, the writers haven't gotten around to editing, and because first drafts are usually followed by major rewrites, it is usually not helpful to focus much on lower-order issues when critiquing a draft at that stage because so many of the sentences themselves are going to change.

Focus on plot issues, character and world-building, settings, dialogue, and transition. For the first chapter reviews, discuss the title, cover, and blurb first before moving on to the analyses of the first chapter.

To reiterate; mind the language, keep an open mind, reread chapters, and put quality before quantity when preparing your feedback. If you have to critique, a suggestion has to follow.
If the work is good and free of errors, well tell the author what really worked and what you enjoyed.

Sourced from GQS, grammarlyblog, and  NowNovel

And of Clay, We Are Created
by Isabel Allenda

They discovered the girl's head protruding from the mudpit, eyes wide open, calling soundlessly. She had a First Communion name, Azucena Lily. In that vast cemetery where the odor of death was already attracting vultures from far away, and where the weeping of orphans and wails of the injured filled the air, the little girl obstinately clinging to life became the symbol of the tragedy. The television cameras transmitted so often the unbearable image of the head budding like a black squash from the clay that there was no one who did not recognize her and know her name. And every time we saw her on the screen, right behind her was Rolf Carlé, who had gone there on assignment, never suspecting that he would find a fragment of his past, lost thirty years before.

First a subterranean sob rocked the cotton fields, curling them like waves of foam. Geologists had set up their seismographs weeks before and knew that the mountain had awakened again. For some time they had predicted that the heat of the eruption could detach the eternal ice from the slopes of the volcano, but no one heeded their warnings; they sounded like the tales of frightened old women. The towns in the valley went about their daily life, deaf to the moaning of the earth, until that fateful Wednesday night in November when a prolonged roar announced the end of the world, and walls of snow broke loose, rolling in an avalanche of clay, stones, and water that descended on the villages and buried them beneath unfathomable meters of telluric vomit.

As soon as the survivors emerged from the paralysis of that first awful terror, they could see that houses, plazas, churches, white cotton plantations, dark coffee forests, cattle pastures—all had disappeared. Much later, after soldiers and volunteers had arrived to rescue the living and try to assess the magnitude of the cataclysm, it was calculated that beneath the mud lay more than twenty thousand human beings and an indefinite number of animals putrefying in a viscous soup. Forests and rivers had also been swept away, and there was nothing to be seen but an immense desert of mire.