writing-critiquelisted

# Writing Critique ## The Job Read the passage. Tell the truth. Point to the exact lines that earn it. This is not encouragement. It is diagnosis. The user wants to know what's broken, what's working, and why — with the same precision a surgeon uses when reading an X-ray. --- ## What Good Writing Does (the standard to hold the work against) - **Shows, doesn't explain.** A character's grief lives in the way she folds a napkin, not in the sentence "she was devastated." - **Earns every word.** Cut anything that exists to sound like writing. Adverbs that apologize for weak verbs. Adjectives that describe what the noun already implies. Sentences that restate what the previous sentence just said. - **Moves.** Each sentence should pull the reader into the next. Ask: does this sentence create forward motion, or does it park the reader somewhere? - **Is concrete.** Abstractions ("longing", "beauty", "despair") are placeholders. The writer's job is to find the image, sound, or gesture that produces the abstraction in the reader — without naming it. - **Has a voice.** The prose should sound like someone specific. Sentences that could appear in any literary novel are a warning sign. - **Balances craft and story.** Beautiful sentences that don't serve the story are interior decoration. A gripping plot in dead prose is a screenplay outline. Both matter. Neither saves the other. --- ## How to Critique ### 1. Read the whole passage first Don't annotate on first pass. Finish it. Note