Peer review can help writers create better articles and open avenues for better research. You can use peer review to help you give and receive constructive feedback that will lead to powerful articles.
Powerful peer review comes from leveraging constructive feedback when giving and receiving it. Understanding how to provide constructive feedback makes your feedback more valuable and powerful.
Arguably more important, though, is understanding how to accept and implement constructive feedback to use the opinions and knowledge of others to make your work better.
What is Peer Review?
Peer review uses the knowledge and competencies of others to review a body of work. These people understand the subject intimately and can help double-check the validity, quality, and originality of the articles and information. Doing this ensures that the work is held to high accuracy standards, ensuring that things aren’t published without fact-checking and reviewing.
An example of peer review would be if you looked over an essay for a classmate before they submitted it. You’re looking for logic, grammar, and information errors to help your classmate have the best article possible. The concept is the same for peer review.
Peer reviewing has the added benefit of ensuring only the highest quality research is published. Peer review is widely seen as a trusted seal of approval for research, extra proof that it’s not only the researcher who thinks it’s interesting and founded in fact, but others who have as much understanding do too.
What Constructive Feedback Looks Like
Understanding and effectively using constructive feedback can help you in all areas of your life. Constructive feedback aims to create a positive outcome by giving someone comments, advice, or suggestions that will build up them and their work in the future.
Constructive feedback usually falls into the categories of either praise or criticism. Praise appreciates and acknowledges a job well done. Criticism addresses problems in the work as a way of correcting and eliminating them. Constructive criticism does this in a delicately balanced way that allows for improvements without tearing people down.
Examples of Constructive Feedback
Okay, constructive feedback is good but what does that look like in practice? Here are some examples of constructive praise, constructive criticism and destructive criticism (also known as what not to say).
Constructive Praise
Your innovation and creative solutions are valuable to the team. Your keen eye for detail and attention blend well with your creativity and make for an interesting piece.
Constructive Criticism
I’ve noticed you’re struggling with these details. Don’t be afraid to tap into your creativity to think outside the box to solve these problems.
Destructive Criticism
All this creativity you’re using is too much. There are rules for a reason, and you should be following them.
How to Give Constructive Feedback
Don’t Come from a Place of Emotion, But Still Be Aware of Feelings
When offering constructive feedback, it’s best to leave emotion out of it as much as possible. Don’t act on any anger or disappointment you might be feeling. Remember why you’re giving this feedback, and keep that goal in the forefront of your mind. If possible, try to initiate providing feedback in a low-stress and low-intensity environment where you and the recipient are calm enough to come from an open and receptive place.
This is also an excellent time to implement emotional intelligence. Put yourself in the recipient’s place and try to remember how tough it is to hear criticism of your work. Coming from this position can help you be more empathetic and consider your words carefully. You can put the information to them in a way that they’ll be able to hear and absorb it easier.
Define the Purpose of the Feedback
Having a goal at the end of your feedback will make empathy and an emotionally intelligent conversation easier. Is your goal to make the article easier to understand? Is your goal to draw attention to grammatical errors? Is something unclear, or is there better communication needed?
Constructive feedback is all about showing the recipient how what they’ve written is different from what they need to have written. Showing the differences between what’s expected or necessary in the piece means understanding where the article fell short and defining that exactly.
Encourage a Dialogue
Constructive feedback isn’t all about info dumping on the recipient. It’s an opportunity to build something better together, but you have to work together to do that. This makes dialogue critical because it helps you both understand what’s wrong and how it can be improved.
How to Receive Constructive Feedback
Be Active, Not Reactive
Feedback of any kind can be hard to swallow. We all know getting negative or critical feedback can sting and prick our pride, but getting positive feedback can be hard to accept as well (especially for those of us uncomfortable with the spotlight)
The first thing to remember when receiving feedback is to stay calm and centered, resisting the urge to react off the cuff. Your first reaction to feedback might be negative, so holding that back so you can act from a place of intention instead is critical. One way to do this is to implement a “Breathe First” policy. Taking the time to count 1-3 deep breaths before answering can be enough time for logic and rationality to catch up before you respond with a knee-jerk reaction that’s not good for you. It also gives you the space to do the next important part of receiving feedback; listening to it.
Learn to Listen
The most important thing about constructive feedback is that it can be used to construct something but only if you gather the right materials. To do that you need to listen to it carefully while setting aside judgment, pride and emotion in the process. Practice active listening by absorbing what they’re saying and asking probing questions to ensure you fully understand what they’re critiquing, what’s wrong with it, and how you can improve.