Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting. – Emmet Fox
I find it very difficult to wrap my brain around the thought processes of some people. As we go through life we interact with others, and make hundreds of decisions every day regarding those interactions; sometimes we make errors in judgment due to ignorance of a situation, or misinterpret another’s feelings and thereby inadvertently cause offense, or foolishly believe a person will react one way when a little insight into his or her personality would’ve predicted a very different reaction (this is especially true when the people involved are of the opposite sex). But every once in a while someone does something so clearly wrong, so obviously rude and so predictably off-putting that one has to wonder if he might not have been under the influence of some potent psychoactive drug at the time.
Most of my readers are probably fair-to-middling cooks; some of you are probably bad or terrible cooks, and some good or excellent ones (any of you who happen to be professional chefs will have to imagine another skill, say illustration, in the place of cooking). Now, consider a circumstance wherein you meet a woman who’s an excellent cook. She has a small restaurant where she has served literally millions of satisfied customers over the years, and is often paid to cater at events; she is widely admired for her cooking skills, has often been asked (and even paid) to critique others’ cooking, and takes justifiable pride in her abilities. Her style, however, does not adhere to current culinary fads; it’s a little old-fashioned and is too complex and highly-spiced for some people, and some dieters feel her portions are too large. Perhaps you’ve encountered her restaurant for the first time, or perhaps you’ve been eating there several times a week for months or years, but at some point you decide that either her preparation of one particular dish, or the way she prepared that dish on one particular day, or even the way she cooks in general, could be improved by some change you have in mind. Now, you don’t own a restaurant; nobody has particularly praised your cooking lately, and even the cooking you do practice is of a different culinary tradition. Do you:
A) Continue to enjoy her food, which really is very good despite the aspect you don’t like;
B) Enjoy the food, but fantasize about how much better it would be if she took your suggestions;
C) Stop going there, and find another restaurant you like better;
D) Ask to speak to her privately and offer your helpful amateur suggestions about how she could improve;
E) Same as D, but at the top of your lungs in front of a packed dining room at her restaurant.
If any of you seriously believe that either D or E is a good idea, and you’ve never been diagnosed as lying somewhere on the autism spectrum, I sincerely suggest you re-examine all of the recent instances in which you’ve mightily pissed someone off and just can’t understand why she should have been insulted. What could possibly be wrong with her? Doesn’t she get that you were just trying to be helpful? Why can’t she humbly accept your wisdom in order to improve herself? Why are all women so crazy?
And after that, you might want to reconsider that helpful email, comment or tweet you’re about to write me.
Ah, free pass!
I knew I had a good reason to be aspie.
Now what DSM magic word should I invoke to absolve Maggie for getting so het up about that sort of thing?
Hey now! I just meant that people on the spectrum sometimes don’t recognize a particular interaction as socially inappropriate, and I had no desire to bust their chops for something that they didn’t recognize as rude.
Nah, it’s not that we don’t recognise what’s rude.
It’s because we know we’re deeper than any shit we can get into so we don’t give a fuck.
Well, in a restaurant you pay for what you get, and therefore giving feedback is acceptable and expected. As a client what is important is not whether you can do better than the cook, but whether you can eat what she serves and come back for more.
If you stop going to a place it is fair if you decide to tell them why. Most people may not ask to speak personnally to the cook, but they can talk to the waitress. Many restaurants have little cards where you can write how satisfied you are with everything and make suggestions.
If the cook has a forum or e-mail address where people can interact with her directly of course she’s going to get all sorts of suggestions and critiques along with the praises. I understand some can be pompous and infuriating, but I don’t find it surprising.
I thought this was going to be a metaphor about sex…
Interesting. When it has all blown over, I hope we’ll find out what provoked this.
For what it’s worth, I’d probably try F: see if I can make my “improved” version of the meal for myself at home.
I suspect this entry was prompted by a comment made by fyngyrz in yesterdays blog in the comments. He had suggested ways that Maggie should have worded a comment she had made. I imagine she also gets people sending emails also suggesting how she should write.
I have received an unusual number of such “helpful” inputs lately; one fellow wrote me a long email “helpfully” suggesting that my paragraphs are so long “nobody” would read them (presumably the 4 million nobodies who already have might disagree) and explaining how I could “improve” my sentence structure. No women reading this will be surprised to know that every single one of these Mr. Fix-What-Ain’t-Broke people wrote under a male name.
To those who think I’m upset: I’m actually more amused than angry. It’s just that I didn’t have a reader question to answer, so I opted for discussion of another kind of reader correspondence instead. As soon as I finished this I turned to tomorrow’s story.
LOL…Maggie, y’can always point out to those who prefer brief morphemes to long compound-complex sentences that you stand in history-changing company — the “Paul” that allegedly penned many of the “New Testament” epistles preferred long-yet-grammatically-correct word blocks to promote his ideas, too! Some are so long in the koine Greek original “Paul” apparently used that, for the sake of subsequent readers, even the wordy-themselves King James Bible 1611 translators and 1769 revisors broke some of Paul’s text into paragraphs that don’t occur in his text!
For a contrasting opinion — me, well, I like your writing style. But, then, I’m another who, as one of your favorited reviewers quipped, “uses ten words when he could use one”, LOL
I am doubtful on that. I found the New Testament basically unreadable due to atrocious bad writing. (The “story” is also complete harebrained nonsense, but it is hard to get that far.) Maggie’s writing is fine and clear, at least with some minimal levels of functional literacy. It may not be the right type for advertising (where even the last moron must get the message), but that is not what it is anyways. Clear and readable writing is not about grammar and sentence-length, it is about getting the meaning across to your indented audience.
Of course, as always there is a “metrics community” in writing as well that thinks you can just count the average number of words in a sentence and then determine the quality of the text from that. That falls flat on its face in reality. (There are a lot of equally stupid “metrics community” in my field of expertise, for example those that think adhering to ISO standards makes software secure. It does not. Hence I have a lot of experience with that particular form of stupidity….)
The only real way to judge the quality of a text is to read it and then look at how your experience was and what you take away from it. This is not a one-dimensional problem.
Absolutely right.
Nor is it an objective one.
BTW, I find Paul to have been an excellent writer and rhetorician despite the fact that what he had to say was largely nonsense (to me). If we take your proffered ‘objective’ measure of success then I think it’s fair to say that he was almost single-handedly responsible for turning an obscure Jewish cult into a world religion. Not bad considering the material he had to work with.
You are certainly right about it being subjective.
Huh?
Maybe I am dense. I thought this was a metaphor for not getting in the way of the paid professional who’s service you have hired. Not advice on how to behave in a restaurant. The comments seem to take this post literally. Guess I was just looking to deeply. I will back quietly out of the kitchen now before the metaphor is stretched as thin as phyllo.
A bit heavy with the salt….eh cheftess? Those who critique your writing have too much time and little to contribute
You have left out a possibility- F) respectfully inform the service providor of something you think you would like done differently, and ask if she/he would be willing to give it a try.
I mean, expertise is expertise, and should be respected, but a service provider is still selling something, and no one is ever to old to learn something new. Maybe the suggestion is ignorant and will end poorly, or maybe its different but potentially benificial- and I for one would rather know what the people I am trying to sell stuff to want, even if its not something I could, or would want to, give.
Its a persinal choice of the service provider to entertain or enact suggestions, but its certainly not socially unacceptable to ask if the service provider is willing to try them. Rudeness is not inherent in the inquiry, its in the presentation and reaction to it (so, if its been made clear on a menu “no substitutions”, don’t ask for one)
Hmm, shoukd have read comments first. On the “helpful” suggestions that aren’t about a personal preference or problem that would simply make things “better”, yeah. That’s probably fair.
One of my favorite writer is Wodehouse, precisely because of how his long phrases are constructed. And the funniest response to a critic ever:
“A certain critic — for such men, I regret to say, do exist — made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.’ He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”
Well, actually, it’s a little more complex than that I think.
If one of my psychology clients would inform me that they think my service would improve if I give a card with date&time of the next appointment, add a light near the door so they’re not standing in the dark when it’s late, or some other suggestion I would not mind at all. When people who you provide a (paid) service for have suggestions that doesn’t seem like a bad thing at all. If my favourite restaurant where I often eat has a website that doesn’t state what times they are open I might suggest they add that.
It’s patronising, unhelpful and unsolicited advice from people that don’t even use your service that’s annoying.
There is a fundamental difference between “I do not like what you do” and “you should do this different”. The first one, if expressed politely, is acceptable, especially when combined with sound reasons. The second one needs some real or perceived superior authority on the part of the person doing the criticizing in order to be acceptable and even then it is a stretch and should be done in private.
Now, you might have heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It basically states that incompetent people very often are so incompetent that they cannot recognize the level of their lack of skill anymore. Hence they might come up with “you should do this different”, when they really have nothing to contribute. But at the same time may actually have completely missed how impolite what they do is because they they think they are actually giving valuable insights.
Well, understanding people on the left side of the Dunning-Kruger spectrum (the incompetent ones) is really hard for people that are not stupid themselves and have a pretty good idea what they can and cannot do well. I run into this issue regularly in my chosen field of expertise. Professionally I have to act with restraint, but privately, I just tell them that they have no clue, and add a nice example if one is handy for the edification of the others that are involved.
On the other hand, these people are a fact of life. So there will always be people that barge in here and suggest you should do things differently, and quite a few, maybe most, will not even be malicious at all and just try to be helpful.
I would suggest treating them with amused tolerance. They just do not have what it takes to understand what is going on and they are not even equipped to detect that shortcoming in themselves and nothing can be done about that. Getting angry is just not worth it. Having your skills respected by everybody is not possible, as many, many people are not equipped to recognize you have these skills in the first place.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect may be determinable in situations that have a right and wrong answer – such as designing a bridge that won’t fall down – but I think the only thing you could achieve by applying it to literature would be to add a pseudo-scientific gloss of faux objectivity to your personal opinion.
Someone with a Masters in literature might read 50 Shades of Grey and ‘know’ she could do better. Someone with a Masters in business might look at the book’s sales figures and ‘know’ she could not.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is generally relevant in any task that requires insight on the side of the people performing it. A blog that has had a lot of steady readers for years is obviously doing some things very right. If people think they need to give basic writing advice to Maggie, then they do not understand the situation at all, and have no clue what makes successful writing. They are also completely unaware of their lack of understanding, otherwise they would not be offering that advice.
The thing is that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is multi-layer: It says that people with low skill in a specific tasks also typically have low skill on the meta-layer, i.e. on evaluating their skills (and that of others) in said task. It takes skill to recognize skill. Because of this multi-layer structure, it is also necessary fuzzy.
One reason for the effect is that many people are quite insight-less in general (and in particular when it comes to their own nature and capabilities) because they only copy what others do without acquiring any kind of understanding why some things work better and others fail. These people usually perceive their copying as successful mastering of a skill, when it is very far from that indeed. A second one is that people with intact self-evaluation can improve their skills because they are in possession of a working success-metric. Nil-whits cannot do that, after all they are already perfect. A side-effect is that those with good skills and insight-levels are always doubting themselves, while complete morons are very sure in everything they do.
Only if you measure ‘rightness’ by page hits, which is not the same as literary merit. Personally I’m just here for the titty pix (Just kidding, Maggie, just kidding).
It’s about as valid as measuring the quality of an E.L. James novel from its sales. It says nothing about Maggie’s writing skill nor about the relevance of any kibitzing she gets (unless the kibitzing is couched in terms of increasing page hits).
However, imagining there is some kind of objective, universalist measure – no matter how ‘fuzzy’ – for the ‘success’ of someone’s writing or its capacity for improvement does say something about you. Should I put it down to the D-K effect?
I think I have clearly enough argued against metrics that I do not need to answer that. Success is not a metric for quality. It is an indicator that needs to be taken with a context.
For some things, success isn’t something that can be judged by others at all, no matter what ‘indicators’ you think you have.
I don’t dispute that. But we are not talking about the general case here.
BTW, there are some judgements about writing that are objectively right or wrong and may reveal the D-K effect.
For example, someone might suggest that “doughnut addicted” is not alliterative through apparent ignorance of the fact that syllabic rhythm rather than word breaks is what determines alliteration. Shakespeare wouldn’t have made such an error.
There is no need for any absolute quality metrics for Dunning-Kruger. A fuzzy sense of “good” and “not so good” is quite enough.