Guidelines to Great Review Responses
If you've been around the site for a while, you're probably familiar with the "Guidelines To Great Reviewing"  from "Writing.Com 101" . The guidelines offer six key characteristics that are contained in most quality reviews: be honest, be encouraging, be respectful, be well-rounded, match the rating, and be visually appealing and easy to understand. It also offers some example questions you might ask yourself as a reader, that you could communicate to the author in your review.
There are also a number of activities and groups on the site that encourage reviewing, and each have their own guidelines about what makes for a quality review. "Anniversary Reviews" , "WdC SuperPower Reviewers Group" , "The WDC Angel Army" , and "Positive Hearts Reviews Group" are all great resources if you're interested in developing your abilities as a reviewer.
But what about responding to reviews?
Most of us who write reviews end up being on the receiving end of an author's ire sooner or later. Perhaps the author feels your feedback was unfair, or that you didn't "get" what they were going for, or any of a dozen other rationalizations. Sometimes it's a defense mechanism at the perception of being criticized, regardless of the merits of the feedback. Sometimes, it may even be a warranted response to unfair commentary, but delivered in a less than polished and professional manner.
So let's look at some ways to respond constructively to reviews.
1. Express Appreciation.
Regardless of whether you agree with a review's content or not, it's always appropriate to thank someone for taking the time to read and review your work. Unless it's clear that the reviewer put in very little effort (i.e., the feedback itself isn't quality), at the very least, an author should thank their reviewer for their time.
2. Cool-Down Period.
If you are bothered by the contents of a review, give yourself a reasonable cool-down period to get past your initial reflexive reaction. Most people have a tendency to get defensive when they're criticized, and it can be difficult to weigh the true merits of a suggestion if your immediate mindset is to challenge the veracity of the feedback. Try setting the review aside and giving yourself an hour, a day, or even a couple of days to center yourself and revisit the feedback from a more neutral point of view.
3. It's About The Work, Not You.
Unless a review is very specifically and explicitly directing their commentary at you the author (which is generally not an advisable approach to reviewing), remember that the feedback is about this specific work, not you as a person. It can be really easy to internalize criticism and to infer that criticisms of a specific piece were intended more broadly (either as a criticism of your writing style or you as a person), but the reality is that most reviewers are only responding to the material they've just read. Not every story, poem, essay, etc. is going to please everybody, and it's okay if some reviews say, "I didn't care for this." That's not necessarily a reflection on you, or the potential of this work in the future. It's a commentary on this particular piece of writing as it exists right now.
4. Take Only What's Useful.
Reviewers are just one person offering one opinion. Even if the reviewer is an accomplished writer or critic themselves, they're still only one person offering one opinion. As the author, it's up to you to decide whether each piece of feedback is worth listening to or not. You are not required to incorporate every piece of feedback you receive. If a review has ten suggestions and only one of them works for this piece of writing, it's okay to only take that one suggestion and discard the rest. Heck, it's okay to take none of the ten suggestions and discard all of them if you really don't think any of them truly improve the piece as you see it.
5. The Guidelines to Great Reviewing Apply to Responses Too.
Remember those six Guidelines to Great Reviewing? They apply to the way you respond to reviews, too! Whether you agree or disagree with the feedback you receive, there's no reason that your response to a review shouldn't be honest, encouraging, respectful, well-rounded, match the rating, and be visually appealing and easy to understand. If someone took the time to give you a detailed, respectful, well-presented review that you felt really picked apart your work, there's no reason to reply with a jumbled, expletive-filled, stream-of-consciousness paragraph where you go off and tell them how they just didn't get your poem at all. Even if you strongly disagree with all of the feedback you've received (and perhaps especially in that case), you should still strive to make any response a positive and professional one.
We live in a society that's increasingly focused on the idea of instant gratification. We've come to expect it in so many areas of our lives, including communication. But it's important to remember that a quality review probably wasn't written on the fly (someone actually took time to think about it and then write up their thoughts), so you don't owe them an instant response that was written on the fly. You get to take the time to think about what you want to say and then carefully compose the response.
Until next time,
Jeff  
 
If you're interested in checking out my work:
"New & Noteworthy Things" | "Blogocentric Formulations" |
Noticing Newbies: February 04, 2026 Issue [#13585]
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