From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Quoting, plus some comments about reading email
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 23:47:03 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 10:25 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Quoting, plus some comments about reading email

> At 07:32 PM 4/22/05 -0400, Ted White wrote:
> >From: "Elspeth Kovar" <ekovar at worldnet.att.net>
>
> >> Unfortunately
> >> most of us aren't good about giving the positive as well as the
negative
> >> and, on the other side, most of us hear the negative much more
strongly
> >> than the positive.
> >
> >Too true.   People should strive to overcome this tendency because much
> >that is ultimately positive can come even from negative feedback.
>
> Yep.  Anyone who has taken a writing class would be familiar with that
> idea.  It can be hard to take people telling you all about the ways that
> your work sucked rocks, but if you put it aside for a bit, then look at
it
> and the criticisms again, you find that the vast majority of them are
well
> justified and that if you work on correcting them the final result is a
> huge improvement.

Indeed.  And that is exactly the environment from which I come, as a
long-time professional writer and editor, and as the current host of The
Vicious Circle, a writers' group founded in the mid-'70s.

--Ted White