 Hey there Foundation staff, Sherm here, and welcome to Sherm's Declassified Skip Survival Guide. Today we are going to talk about one of the most important and under-appreciated jobs in the SCP community, giving critique and how to do it well. The goal is to help more community members become good critters so we can continue to grow. I don't think I'm being controversial when I say that more talented critters would be a helpful addition to the community. Beyond skimming around the forums, I also checked out betterwritingfeedback.com for advice for this guide. Yeah, bet you didn't know that website was a thing. Go check it out for more in-depth critique giving help. Study it. Learn it. Before I dive into the meat of this episode, I want to give thanks to those heroes who take the time to do what is essentially a real job in the outside world for free in the SCP community. You guys have all the skills that I'm about to list and are willing to put in time that you could be doing literally anything else to comb through sometimes illegible and ridiculous ideas and help shape them into the excellent quality work that we strive for on the SCP Wiki. For anyone wanting to step up and learn how to give the critiques that help a skip survive on the main list, the first thing you need to know is that giving critique is a skill, and like any skill, you will improve with training and practice. There are four base skills that help to build your critiquing skill. You have to be an excellent writer, editor, proofreader, and teacher. Let's break those down. The first one should be fairly obvious. You can't help people with their writing if you can't write yourself. Maybe you take a creative writing class in school. Maybe you get some textbooks online and teach yourself. Whatever you have to do to make yourself a capable writer. This also means you should probably be a hardcore reader. Turns out that most people who are good at writing read a lot and absorb lessons from texts that they have read previously. Sidebar, on top of being a good all-around writer, you should also be very familiar with the skip wiki style and flex cannon. It's great to be a good writer, but if you aren't knowledgeable about the wiki, you won't be able to help people write for the wiki. The next two, editing and proofreading, are often thought of as the same thing, but we need to separate them a little bit. Editing is the macro sweep. You're looking to see if the story makes sense and if all the ideas are presented clearly. Remember that any idea can be a skip if done well, even if it isn't your favorite flavor of idea. And this is where that happens. Proofreading is all about the minutiae. Spelling and grammatical layers, punctuation, formatting issues. Once you nail down your story structure and ideas back in the editing phase, your proofreading sweeps are all about cleaning it up and making it look pretty. Finally, you have to be a teacher. A teacher transfers knowledge from themselves to others. This requires extreme patience and excellent communication skills. There's another level of difficulty because you are doing this via text on the internet, where untrained writers will likely seek retakes as personal attacks. You have to make sure to be overly respectful and positive. If you call their idea or their writing garbage, they aren't going to listen to anything else you have to say, no matter how good your critiques might be. We don't need a bunch of house MD wannabes dicking around the community. We need more misfrizzles cultivating new writers' talents and expanding imaginations. To cap things off, here's a couple quick bonus tips that might help you in your critting career. It helps to present yourself as a good writer by typing with proper grammar and punctuation in your critiques. Typical internet shorthand doesn't instill confidence in your abilities. The most common complaint to feedback receivers is that the feedback they got was too general or vague to be of any help. Make sure you are specific in your critiques, for example, instead of saying, spelling in grammatical errors everywhere. Take the time to say, in the second paragraph, you misspelled blank. It takes longer, but if you're going to do something, take the time to do it right. Along the same lines, feedback is not about just fixing the SCP. It's also about guidance in helping the writer learn so that you don't have to correct the same mistake for the same person again and again and again. Don't forget to tell them why the correction is necessary. For instance, instead of saying, the O5s would never do that, you could say, the O5 council is almost always stoic and in control, so they wouldn't lose their cool and make an all caps note with 15 expletives. This has been a short guide to becoming a better critter for the SCP or any other writing community. Take what you've learned to clean up yours and other skips to create the SCP authors of the future and to help them learn to give good crit as well. Thank you guys for tuning into another episode of Sherm's Declassified Skip Survival Guide. If you like what we're doing on the channel, do that like, share, and subscribe Mumbo Jumbo, and don't forget to click the bell. And if you really like what's going on around here, hit up the Site 42 Patreon or the Site 42 Store and support the channel that way. You can also join the Site 42 Discord server if you want to venture deeper into Site 42 itself. See you next time, Foundation staff.