On Praise and Criticism, from a Creator's Standpoint

 

I realize there is a certain amount of irony in writing a short essay that criticizes people for how they go about criticizing people. All it does is make me want to write this more. Perhaps it will even self-demonstrate the point of the question I'm trying to ask.

That question being, is there such thing as too much praise or criticism in one place, constructive or not?

 Tell me if you've seen this one before; a critic or reviewer states at the top of the review their primary opinion on the work they're reviewing, spends several paragraphs detailing all of the points that contribute to that primary opinion, skims over a few points that mitigate said opinion, then closes out the review by effectively restating the primary opinion with a different set of words. I'm willing to wager that, if you've read enough reviews before, there's at least one review you can think of that fits into that pattern. It's a very common formula that critics default to, sometimes (seemingly) without thinking about it beforehand.

The problem with that formula is that, if taken to its extreme (which it often is), it paints an incomplete picture of the work in question. By spending several paragraphs on positives and barely addressing potential negatives, you give the impression that you saw nothing that would discourage people other than yourself from enjoying the thing you're talking about, and that there is next to nothing for the creator to work on or improve. Likewise, by spending several paragraphs addressing negatives over potential positives (which is a much more common practice, I've found), the inevitable takeaway is that the thing you're reviewing has nothing or next to nothing good about it, and the creator is given no indication that they've done anything right or that they've done much of anything other than "fuck up". The latter scenario is especially bizarre in situations where the critic or reviewer doesn't find the work they're reviewing to be all bad as, more times than not, it sends the message that the creator should scrap everything they've done and go back to the drawing board completely. (When, more times than not, they've done plenty of things right that just happen to be overshadowed by the things they've done wrong.)

It bothers me that this is such a prevalent issue in reviewing in general. From such missteps in journalism are careers ended before they can truly begin. As if there aren't enough things in the world that discourage people from pursuing creative work.