Criticism

Some suggestions about how to give it and how to receive it

Years ago in a class called Nonfiction Writing, Professor James P. Degnan — a dear friend, a wonderful teacher, and the best writer I’ve ever known — marked a passage in an essay I’d written and scrawled in the margin: “You are maundering!” I had to look up the word. After I’d done so, I reread the passage and saw that Professor Degnan was right.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about criticism, read a lot about it, and come to some conclusions.

Here they are.

The Critic and the Criticized

The person giving a criticism always says he’s giving an evaluation; the person receiving a criticism sometimes thinks he’s receiving a denunciation.

To the listener or reader who wants to give an evaluation of a speaker’s or writer’s statement, the American grammarian Sheridan Baker offers a method in The Complete Stylist and Handbook. According to the method, the listener or reader should ask and answer “the four essential critical questions” about the statement: What? How? How well? So what?

The Method

The question “What?” refers to the matter of the statement, to the point that the speaker or writer has tried to make: What has he tried to communicate?

The question “How?” refers to the manner of the statement, to the way in which the speaker or writer has tried to communicate: How has he tried to communicate? (Has he been explicit or implicit, humorous or serious, stilted or slangy?)

The question “How well?” refers to the quality of the manner: How well has the speaker or writer communicated what he has tried to communicate? (Has the way in which he has tried to communicate helped or hindered communication?)

The question “So what?” — which Baker calls “the ultimate evaluative question” — refers to the quality of the matter, to the contribution that the matter has made to our understanding of life: So what has the speaker or writer taught us about being human?

Some Suggestions

In A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, the American grammarians Bergen and Cornelia Evans offer these observations about criticism: “The…

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