 My name is Dr. Sumerian, and today we're going to talk about how to give good critique. Yesterday, I was scrolling through the SCPs on site forums and I realized that nearly 25 different drafts were waiting for replies. Three hours later, I was done with 16 drafts and I was burnt way the hell out. To be fair, I was really burnt out around the 10th draft, but I kinda kept pushing through because I figured the more I could do the better. Anyway, I was really tired afterwards, so I took a nap, and when I woke up, I had a message from a staff member pointing out how some of the critique I'd given was less than useful. I looked, and they were right. Out of the 16 reviews I wrote, only about 10 of them were good and useful. Three were borderline and definitely needed more time and effort from me, and three were just useless. So, I'm going to use this as a teaching moment and talk about how critique can go wrong. Number one, don't be harsh. I know, harsh critique is like a whole thing I do here, and expect another one of those episodes on Thursday. But the people that are going to be in those videos had an example of exactly how mean I was going to be, and they sought me out with a full understanding of that. So that means when it comes to communicating to them the information they need to know, they're going to be able to internalize the critique I give, even when I'm mean about it, because they can take it as entertainment. In the wild, though, harshness or meanness will not help you get your point across. Being blunt is one thing, but once you cross over to being mean, you're losing the ability to be heard by the person you're trying to help, so just don't do it. As a side note, this is one of the four I'm going to talk about today that actually doesn't apply to any of my posts, but I thought it was important enough to mention anyway. Number two, make sure your review actually focuses on elements in the article. General notes like a thing that does a thing, or a thing that kills people, or a monster manual entry doesn't actually help, unless the person in question already understands all of the context and baggage those terms carry. And if they knew what you meant when you said it, they probably wouldn't have written it like that. If it's a monster manual entry, and that's why it sucks, explain why monster manual entries are bad. Number three, give concrete examples of what's wrong while referencing the draft itself, then offer specific feedback on how to fix those things. This relates to the last point. Don't just say the piece is poorly written, or there are a lot of grammar errors here. If you want to help someone with those particular problems, provide an example or two of what they've done wrong. Number four, understand the context of where and why you're giving the critique. There's a remarkable difference between going out onto the forums and critiquing people who have made a general request for help, and critiquing someone who's come to you specifically for help. Just as an example, since 2014 I have posted 73 articles to the Wiki, and 72 of those are still on the Wiki. One was taken down by me, but it was not in danger of deletion. So why is this relevant? Well, it means when I say this is good, it will survive on the site and you should post it. That's actually remarkably useful information to people that know me, but it's borderline useless to anyone else. If someone seeks you out and their draft is low effort, feel free to point it out, because they are definitely wasting your time. But if someone makes a low effort draft and puts it out for general feedback, either in chat or on the forums, it's not okay to give them low effort critique back, because no one is forcing you to engage them. Anyway, I thought I'd outline those few reasons really quickly. Small side note, unless I'm wrong, I think I'm going to hit a thousand subscribers by the end of this week, and it might even be in the next couple of days. I have no idea what to do for that, I know I want to do something in next Tuesday's video, so if you have suggestions, tweet them at me. That's right, I got to me a tweeter now. You can find me at D. Sumerian, and there'll be a link to that in the description down below. Beyond that, hit the subscribe button and share this video with your friends. Thanks for watching.