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A little constructive criticism
comments (0) March 6th, 2008 in Blogs
Kevin Ireton, editor-at-large
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I neglected to post an entry here
last week because all my energy has been going into an essay about green
building that I’m writing for this year’s Houses issue. Well, I finally
got a rough draft that I was happy with and gave a copy to my boss to get his
feedback. Secretly, I think I knew that I was pushing the boundaries of what
the editor of Fine Homebuilding could say about the state of building in this country. But I was also feeling
pretty smug about what a great writer I am.
My boss sent me a page of thoughtful criticism, but what jumped out at me was
his assertion that the piece was a “relentless, humorless, unbending screed.” I
had to look up screed. I knew it wasn’t going to be good. It means a
long piece of writing, one typically seen as tedious; a rant; a diatribe.
Maybe I shouldn’t have compared the houses we build today to cancer cells,
“proliferating across the country, using too many resources in their
construction, and then, voraciously, insidiously gobbling fossil fuels day
after day, year after year, slowly killing their host.” Actually, I might have
gotten away with that outrageous analogy—if I hadn’t gone on to speculate that
the current slump in the housing market might be a good thing, like
chemotherapy, slowing down the aforementioned cancerous growth.
Needless to say, I was pissed about the criticism, in part because it meant I
wasn’t done with the damn essay, but mostly because my boss was right. It was
an unbending screed, and it wasn’t going to change anybody’s mind. No matter how
passionately I felt what I felt. No matter how eloquently I expressed myself.
Because here’s the thing: You can’t convince anybody of anything if they stop
listening to you.
I was making other mistakes in the essay, too. I was introducing too many ideas
without fully developing any of them, which reminded me of a letter that Wendell Berry once wrote to his friend Wes Jackson, the president of the Land Institute in Kansas. Wes had sent a
piece of his own writing and asked Wendell’s opinion.
"My dear Wes, my dear friend and teacher, I'm bound to tell you, with
great reluctance and entire respect, that I think this is bad work. It is full
of ideas and insights that I recognize as brilliant and that have already been
of the greatest usefulness to me, but I recognize them here only because I have
heard you tell about them better than you have written about them here.
“… Nothing is fully or particularly or patiently developed. Some very large and
problematical concepts you wave by with only a perfunctory assertion. And you
don't make the connections, the transitions. Sometimes in lieu of a transition
you offer only a label or heading. Sometimes you just ran the head of one
concept into the tail of another. Reading, one is constantly wondering how you
got to where you are from where you just were.”
We all need friends—and bosses—who will tell us the truth even if it’s not what
we want to hear.
posted in: Blogs
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About this blog
As the editor of Fine Homebuilding, I spend my weekdays trying to produce a magazine that will satisfy 300,000 of the most demanding builders, both professional and amateur. As the owner of a 200-year old Cape in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I spend weekends working on my house.
Each activity invariably informs, and complicates, the other. In this blog, I’ll offer observations from both worlds -- publishing and building -- with the hope of providing some useful or at least entertaining insights.
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