@123...: yes, that is interesting, I never though about it this way. My experience is quite different. I was an avid reader since I was 3. By the time I entered high school, I was extremely well read so all of my writing attempts were far beyond my age and as such they invited a lot of praise both from my teachers and students and friends. I never showed my work to my parents, didn't have very good relationship with them and they discouraged art in every form. Then, I went to pursue a scientific career and for almost 15 years I wrote a lot, but they were scientific essays and case studies, although my field lent itself to writing people's biographies of sorts, so in that sense, the reports often followed the format of a short story. By the time I took time to start writing again, I found that my stories had lots of support from the readers, and it was me who wasn't happy with the standard, it was me who was my own worst critic, so I pursued self-education in creative writing. Now, what's left is that I am a really fast learner. I welcome all useful feedback with open arms, and I am really lucky to have a husband and a sister who are very sensible and well read, who regularly take apart my paragraphs to such an effect that they end up being truly of the quality that I would be happy to publish. So I never had the experience of "hating" the criticism, if anything, I always wanted more useful criticism than I was getting. Edit: sorry, of course I had experience with hating criticism, but it wasn't a dominant experience. More often, the feedback was either useful or useless, depending on where I looked for it (a trusted beta reader will more often give useful feedback than a random person on the internet, for example, at least that's what I found, which is not to say that all internet critique is useless )
Understood (well, all of your comment but this in particular ). I guess I've never been in a situation where I only posted a snippet for critique. Brainstorming with my beta partners, yes, but not for critique. Probably for the very reason you pointed out - I would have to explain soooo much for them to understand the context, I might just as well post the chapter! And really, other than a grammatical or phrasing quandary, I don't really see any reason to post just a snippet. Of course, I've only posted to two forums in the past; otherwise it's always been within my beta group. But in all cases it was SOP to post a full chapter at a time, so that probably explains my perplexity at posting anything less than that.
My view is that everyone has a story to tell, and the aim of a critique should be to lead someone to that goal. In one case it may mean pointing out technical errors. In another it may mean suggestions about timing, character development etc. Not everyone is looking to create a masterpiece and so should not be judged relative to that standard. We can only learn a few things at a time, so a good critique would firstly determine the current level of the writer and then criticise accordingly.
We would like to support for critique, because it makes the writers to express their ideas comfortably, which results in satisfying the needs of the readers and success.
