 Ahoy, ahoy, and welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about critique on the SCP Wiki. That's right, sometimes we still do content about writing on this channel. And today we're going to use the extremely good and official guide to being a sh** critiquer by Rounder House as our, let's say, roadmap to how not to give critique. I've done videos before on how not to give critique on the SCP Wiki, and let's talk for just a second about what critique is meant to do. So critique is meant to help an author who is seeking feedback improve their writing in general. Remember that the SCP Wiki is a collection of amateur authors, most of which are really trying hard to become better at their craft. So what we do is we have a big collection of people who come together and you can pick and choose a little bit from here and there and everywhere to try and get people's advice on how to improve your writing based on the stuff that, say, someone else is doing correctly that they understand and that they can help you with. Well, Rounder House went over a collection of what I like to call faux pas, but he treated it as basically a guide on how to do it the right way. And by do it the right way, he meant do it the wrong way. It's a lot of fun, but I'm not going to like grab all like read directly from his guide and then parrot it out to you, but I am going to go over some of the major points. So there are really five, five major points here. The first point is talk down to the author. A lot of people, when they give critique, forget the fact that there's another person on the other end of it, or they get into this mode where they think that the SCP Wiki is all about being as mean as possible to the person that they're trying to give critique to. This is a problem because what it does is it limits the ability of the person you're speaking to to fundamentally respond in a way that actually allows them to improve when you attack a person, not their work. What you're doing is you're making it so that they their focus changes and they're no longer thinking about improving the work necessarily either defending themselves or trying to improve themselves, which is not your job. You're not a life coach. You're none of you're not any of those things. Don't attack. So and we've got some information here on what what you on the phrasings you can use so you can say you didn't enjoy an article. And if somebody gets offended at that, that's really on their own sense. But if you tell them it was a disappointing article, you're making like you're attaching emotional baggage to it. He also uses the example of I feel like you could have put more effort into this part, which there's no easy way to say some things. But there are ways to soften the blow. But the blunt version of that is this article is lazy and there was a lack of effort from the author. Or I didn't find it funny as opposed to something like it says here. This article didn't get a single lap out of me, but I don't think that's harsh enough, something like there is no one in the world who would find this funny. What is wrong with you? Or, you know, instead of, you know, I don't find it funny, but other people might or that kind of thing. Or this feels mean spirited. Which is an objective kind of like, well, not an objective, it's always subjective feels as that's raised a point of mind feels. It's a subjective evaluation, but it is one that can give the author an opportunity to actually examine their work or just it's straight up insulting them for being mean spirited. So the important part is don't assume that the author that you're giving critique to knows already what they've done wrong and just needs you to confirm it. They're asking for critique because they think they put out good work. If they haven't deal with that. And also this covers the important parts here. The difference between assuming that what you say is absolute fact or opinion, what you're saying is still opinion. And what you're saying is not necessarily even correct in and of itself. It's just your take on the article. Not and then a lot of and sometimes people will fall into this trap. Even when they're experienced critiquers, where they just assume that what they're saying is absolutely 100 percent correct. It's not always the second thing that a lot of people do that's incorrect or what's the best way to put this that can be problematic is to never acknowledge that any parts of the article you read were good. Even if there are parts that you liked, if you individually only focus in on the stuff you didn't like, you are doing both the disservice to the author and to yourself. First of all, because you're basically sitting yourself up to not be able to enjoy things. And secondly, you're not helping the author because they don't know which parts necessarily need to be fixed or left alone. What works is just as important as what doesn't work when you're giving critique because if a whole section of the article sucks, which we're going to talk about this in more declarative terms right now, because we're not talking about anything specific. We're not trying to communicate with another human being. If an article sucks, parts of it suck, let's say, but parts of it are good. You need to give the author somewhere to go. You can't just say this whole thing is bad. Go home. You can say this part this part worked for me. This part could be developed more maybe if you wanted to. And this part over here made me laugh a little bit. And then they have a sort of a roadmap in ways to improve. But if you say all of it sucked, where do they fix it? You can't that's the end of the sentence. The next one is something that I've been guilty of myself from time to time. And it's also something that I think you can. What's the word? You can still do if you do it in the sense of this is just a suggestion, because a lot of people will come to you for critique and not, especially established authors will come to you for critique and assume that what you're saying is absolute truth. So you have to couch it in the idea of this is how I would do it. It's just a suggestion. Maybe you can use elements from the approach that I'm suggesting to fix it in a way that in the version that you want to write. But the issue is suggesting that they do something completely different than what they've currently done. This can help people. If you run into someone who is frustrated beyond belief because they cannot figure out an approach, offering them an approach is fine. However, if they actually know exactly what they want to do and you do that, then you are failing them as a critiquer because what the information that the help you're giving them won't help them. They already understand what approach they want to take. They have settled on it. They want to write this particular kind of article. And you can do this as a suggestion, but never tell them that this is the way they absolutely must do it. Next up is essentially coming into it with preconceived notions of what you think an article is or is going to be or should be. A lot of this is going into an article with an idea that you're just not going to enjoy it. Articles are meant to be entertainment. That's what writing generally is almost invariably. I should say that's what creative writing generally is supposed to be. So if you go into it with the idea that you're absolutely not going to enjoy it, then you have legitimately. What's the word I'm looking for? You're done yourself and the author of this service because there's no point where you're going to go through it. You're going to you're going to find faults. There's always going to be faults in everything. And then you're going to use those faults to justify your original assumption. Whereas if you had gone into it with less expectations, you may have found that say a pacing issue like in paragraph three, like you get through it and you're like, oh, this is so boring. I can't read any further and you stop. But if you'd gone into it with no expectations, that pacing issue may have cleared itself up or it may just be a temporary departure and you can say in your critique that paragraph three was a little paced a little slowly. But otherwise, I enjoyed the article and give the other critique that you're going to give or go into it, like I said, with the expectation that it's a bad article hit paragraph three and just go, I'm not going any further. This is a bad article and that's your response. That's bad critique. And that's you screwing up, honestly. Finally, there's the one of the worst forms of critique. They did that you what you have. You have to say something. What you have to say is the most important thing that this person is going to hear all day, but you don't have anything to say. So you just go, um, this sucks minus one or minus one. Or I don't like the theme minus one. You know, the idea that you have to throw something on there to justify why you didn't like it like you didn't like it so much, but you don't have any good reasons for it. But you got to leave a comment. You don't got to leave a comment. There's a lot of authors out there who like kind of feel bad whenever anyone leaves a minus one to the article, they grade it poorly. And then they, you know, don't comment as to why it's like, how can I fix it? But sometimes people are just, you just don't like an article and that's fine. You don't have to leave a comment explaining, hey, I just didn't like your article. Period. So those are the essentially the five different kinds of bad critique, not the five different kind. They're probably plenty more. But those are, I'd say, five of the most common types of bad critique as outlined by the rounderhouse critique guide. All the world is it called exactly again? It's the roundhouse is extremely good and official guide to being a shitty critter. I think you should go under the wiki and give this a read. There'll be a link in the description below. A roundhouse is a fantastic author with a terrible author page. And yeah, give him a give him a look. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, scroll down, hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that. And if you want to support the channel even further, and I'm talking to you, Carl, head on over to patreon.com. Ford slash D. Cimmerian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Dr. J. Redacted and Sinjeriki, who both pledged at $100 and Morgan, who has pledged at $40. It is nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Thursday.