Feedback Without A Standard Is A Verdict

This year AI shook up creative strategy. Most teams are still working like it didn't.

Ari Murray, Chief Digital Officer at Salt and Stone sits down with Bryan Harvey, Head of Brand at Hightouch, for an honest conversation about what's breaking on creative teams right now, how the roles are changing, and what a day looks like when creatives spend it on ideas, concepts, and craft while agents handle the manual execution.

Leave with new insights from 3 experts in the field and 5 prompts to instantly improve your creative output.

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A second-place ribbon and the word sophomoric can sit on the same poem for decades if nobody names the standard. I learned that in high school, when I wrote a long poem built around the five stages of grief.

It was not perfect. It resembled the kind of work a teenager produces upon realizing that complex emotions can serve as creative material, and when technical skill is present but lived experience is limited. I invested significant effort into the poem. One section underwent as many as six drafts before I was satisfied. That same section earned second place in a multi-school competition.

After that, I showed it to a teacher.

His feedback, said to my face, was brief: well-written, but sophomoric.

I didn’t ask what he meant. I was taken aback, because those weren’t the words I expected. Even if I had asked, I was a teenager in a classroom full of other teenagers, all trying to get feedback on their projects, while I stood quiet and tried to sort out whether he had called the work immature, the subject immature, or me immature.

I never found out.

A second-place finish and that sentence have lived side by side ever since. How can the same piece be good enough for recognition and still be sophomoric? Which reading was right? What did either judgment mean? Compared to what?

That question is one reason I mentioned in Bounded, Not Blocked that we would eventually address feedback collection. A draft does not become clearer solely because another person reads it. Occasionally, another person’s response provides a more insightful perspective on the work. At other times, it results in a comment that remains with you for years.

The difference is whether you can see the standard the sentence measures against.

This is the first of three letters I want to share with you about the feedback-collection facet of writing. We aren’t touching editing or publishing yet. This is the stage where your draft leaves your hands long enough for another person to experience it, before you decide what you will do with their response.

As I wrote in The Act Before Identity, feedback collection was one of the weaker facets in my own understanding of writing. I understood how to research, draft, and edit. I had less understanding of how to invite another person into the middle of that work without turning their reaction into a judgment of whether I belonged there.

Seneca is useful here because he was not building a productivity system or promising anyone a pain-free life. His letters are exercises in how a person might notice their judgments, choose their conduct, and continue practicing while still imperfect. That posture fits feedback, because nobody needs another person to explain that criticism can sting.

The sting is real. Treating those feelings, what Seneca refers to as “first movements,” as the whole event is the mistake.

A reader’s reaction can matter without turning into a verdict on your worth just because it arrived in your inbox. The cheap version of Stoicism says outside opinions don’t count, and that version turns discernment into avoidance.

A reader can be wrong, imprecise, cruel, distracted, or working from a different set of expectations than yours. They can also show you something you could not see on your own.

Seneca’s first movements still happen. Even the wise sage flinches, and the work is what you do after the flinch.

Many writers ask for feedback too broadly. They send a draft and ask, “What did you think?”

It sounds open-minded. It functions as an invitation for a verdict.

When you ask someone what they think without naming what you need to learn, you give them no defined job beyond reacting to the whole of you through the work. Praise buys a short relief. Criticism leaves you exposed. Neither gives you much to do next, because neither has a visible standard behind it.

I have had feedback run in every direction.

Back to the poem. A media specialist at my school knew me through her patronage of the marching band. She didn’t know I was a writer, but when she heard me read my competition entry, she gave me specific praise about my meter and language. The approval felt good, and it also taught me what she believed I was doing well. I studied those lines against the older versions, and I started finding those lines in the first and second drafts of later poems instead of after four or five rewrites.

My undergraduate thesis committee had more power over me than any casual reader ever could. They could determine whether I graduated from the Honors College, yet I did not feel personally judged by them, because their role was clear from the start. They were there to assess whether I had completed the work I had agreed to complete, and to a sufficient degree.

Most recently, freelance editors gave me small format notes on articles. Put a heading every 150 or 200 words. Break this paragraph sooner. Make the tutorial sequence easier to scan. Those notes felt petty at first, and I took them in stride and adapted. The client had already set the standard: the articles needed to work for readers moving quickly through practical information. Disagreeing was available. Deciding the standard wasn’t my job.

Praise didn’t make the useful cases useful, and criticism didn’t make the clear ones harmful. I could see the measure, so I could use the note. The teacher’s mixed sentence sat in my head for years because I could not see the measure behind it. I still go back to that classroom with confusion and disappointment. The other notes I can recall as lessons.

The standard disappears another way, too. Sometimes you can state exactly what you need, and the reader’s history with you still becomes the real measure. A person who has known you through particular failures, hopes, fears, or arguments may read the draft through all of that before they ever get to the sentence you asked about. In those moments, the work may be less on trial than the version of you they have already decided they see.

That sits close to the issue I raised in Discerning Writers: subjective feedback can dress itself up as intellectual analysis. The reader may have a real reaction. A reaction is not automatically a universal diagnosis.

Without a visible standard, you become whatever the reader sees. With a clear standard, the sting still happens. It just has less of you to grab.

Feedback needs a job. A vague hope that someone will confirm the draft is good will not do it. If you frame the ask as a disguised request for permission to continue, you have already put yourself in the wrong seat. Get clear on what you need before you hand the pages over.

The best way I have found to state that job is: “I want this reader to tell me whether X, measured against Y, so I can decide Z.”

For example: I want this reader to tell me whether the opening establishes the central problem clearly, measured against the expectations of a first-time reader, so I can decide whether the current structure needs a different entry point.

That sentence creates a standard before the feedback arrives. It tells the reader what kind of attention you need, and it tells you what decision their response is meant to inform.

This is where The Writer’s Scaffold becomes useful again. The Scaffold exists to make the purpose of each section visible before you draft it. You do not need to re-create the whole thing for feedback. You only need to know which part of the structure you are testing and what it must accomplish.

You should also decide whether the feedback is meant to fix this draft or train your next one. Those jobs are related. They are not the same task.

The media specialist’s feedback on my poems did more than compliment the poem she had heard. It trained my eye. By telling me what language and rhythms had worked, she helped me recognize those choices earlier in later drafts. That is feedback with a longer shelf life.

For now, ask yourself whether you are trying to make an immediate revision decision or build a capacity you will use next time.

There is one uncomfortable test here. Years ago, I sent agent and publisher queries for a revised version of my college novel.

Looking back, I can admit that the silence I received felt easier than a real answer. Since no one replied, I did not have to confront the possibility that the work, a project I wanted to move on from at that point, needed more from me.

If getting no response would relieve you, name that before you ask anyone to read. You may still be ready for feedback. You also need to be honest about whether you want information, or whether you want the draft to disappear into a polite void. Silence that feels like relief is an avoidance ritual, and I ran one.

Seneca’s advice on friendship is useful because it begins before trust. He recommends that you judge before you trust. Then, once you have judged well, trust fully.

He is not telling you to build a perfect circle of readers who agree with you. He is telling you to choose people for a role, instead of taking whoever happens to be nearby, complimentary, or willing.

A reader should be able to point to the specific thing they saw. They should be willing to name the role they are playing. They should have enough time for a brief follow-up if their note is unclear. And you should consider whether their history with you will overpower the standard you give them.

There are at least four reader roles worth separating:

The reader you need depends on the purpose you named.

When I redesigned a sequence of stories for my tabletop group, the players initially pushed back. They preferred the old structure because they were judging the content as if it were a single-player video game: personal progression, individual reward, clear ownership over the next unlock.

I was designing for a different standard. This was an active, multiplayer setting. I wanted the stories they would undergo to create shared decisions and group consequences. Once that standard became clear, the redesign worked better for the table, even though it did not satisfy the first expectation they brought in.

A reader who likes your draft is a pleasant accident. The person you actually need is someone who can participate honestly in the process you named.

“What did you think?” is a verdict-shaped question. It invites the reader to rate the work, summarize their taste, or search for something intelligent to say about it. Sometimes that produces useful notes. Most of the time, it leaves you trying to reverse-engineer what their reaction means.

Ask for observations before you ask for fixes.

You might ask:

These questions give the reader permission to describe their actual experience. They do not force the reader to become your editor, and they do not make you responsible for following whatever prescription they eventually offer.

That distinction matters because, as I wrote in The Act Before Identity, the writer still controls which words enter the revision. The reader can reveal where the experience of the draft broke down. They cannot replace your responsibility for deciding how the work should change.

There will be more to say in the next letter about separating evidence from suggested fixes once notes arrive. For now, stay on the asking side of the process.

Make it possible for the reader to tell you what happened in them while reading.

Feedback expands to fill whatever attention you give it. Seneca wrote often about time as something people surrender too easily: to distraction, busyness, other people’s demands, and the false belief that more is always better. Feedback can become one more place where writers hand over their attention without first deciding what it is worth.

Set three limits before you send the draft:

The teacher’s note stayed unresolved partly because there was no follow-up window. It appeared, landed, and disappeared into the next student waiting for his attention. I had no process for asking what he meant later, and neither of us had agreed that there would be one. He had a line of teenagers and no cost for leaving the sentence unexplained.

At the other extreme, I made a YouTube video a long time ago about a controversial game and opened it to whoever wanted to respond. There were no chosen readers, no shared purpose, no defined end point, and no limit on how many people could turn a reaction into a statement about me as a person.

An open call with no end date will collect judgment. It will not necessarily collect feedback.

I have not yet had the problem of too many beta readers for a fiction project. My pool is small enough that the constraint is usually built in. A small pool is still a limit, and naming it matters. Otherwise the temptation is to keep asking until someone says the thing you hoped to hear, or to keep collecting notes until the draft no longer feels like yours.

Choose a number. Choose a date. Choose a time when clarifying questions end.

You still get to care. You also get to keep enough attention to make a decision.

The fifth decision is about how you will behave when the feedback comes.

You cannot reliably choose your best response in the middle of feeling judged. A reaction gathers momentum. The longer you let it build, the more likely you are to mistake the first story your mind tells for the whole truth.

So you decide beforehand what you want to practice.

Courage is the willingness to make your case when something essential is at stake. I have had freelance editors cut tutorial steps from articles because the pieces needed to fit a client’s format. I accepted cuts I should have questioned because I needed the contract and did not want to create friction. A simple prior commitment, like saying “I will make one case for what must stay,” would not have guaranteed that the step remained, as I said earlier, I didn’t have final say. But it would have made me act as if the point mattered, which it did to me.

Justice is treating the reader as more than an obstacle between you and your preferred version of the work. My accountability partner and I disagree about taste often. I do not keep him around because he always confirms my instincts. I keep him around because his disagreement can sharpen a choice. I can reject his suggestions without treating his effort as contempt.

Wisdom is knowing which standard should decide the outcome. My tabletop players enjoyed the redesigned quests once the medium’s actual needs became visible. Their initial resistance was still evidence. It told me what expectation I had created. Their first preferred solution was not automatically the right one for the work.

Temperance is restraint in reply. It is the ability to resist explaining yourself so quickly that the reader never gets to finish telling you what happened. We will deal with that more directly in the future.

Pick one virtue for your next request. You are not trying to become a Stoic sage before you can share a chapter. You are giving yourself one chosen behavior to reach for when the first movements of feedback arrive.

I made The Writer’s Feedback Brief for this exact point in the process.

The private half is for you. It asks you to name the purpose of the feedback, whether you are trying to fix or train, the standard you are using, the reader criteria that matter, and the virtue you want to practice.

The second half is for the person reading your work. It gives them the request itself, the limits around the process, and the follow-up window.

It is the first resource I have made that is designed to be partly handed to someone other than the writer.

That matters because feedback is not solely an internal system. You can do all the thinking in the world about your draft, but eventually another person needs to know what you are asking of them. The Brief makes that request visible without turning your reader into an unpaid employee or a judge with unlimited authority.

Use it as written, change it for your project, or take the underlying structure and build your own. The outcome matters more than adherence.

Take one finished draft you are considering sharing. Before you send it, write the purpose sentence from before: “I want this reader to tell me whether X, measured against Y, so I can decide Z.”

Then write three questions about the effects of the draft. Choose one reader whose role fits the job. Set the number of readers, the deadline, the follow-up window, and how you’re going to choose to respond to feedback when it arrives.

Send the draft only when those steps are done.

My guess is that the purpose sentence will be the hard part. You may find that you wanted a verdict more than you wanted information. You may worry that a specific request feels clinical, as if you are telling someone how to read.

That discomfort is worth noticing. You are not controlling their reaction. You are giving their attention somewhere useful to land.

Skipping those decisions cost me a teacher’s note I could never act on. It cost me tutorial steps I did not defend. Making the standard visible gave me feedback that trained later drafts, and it let people with real power over my work evaluate it without making me feel personally condemned.

My next novel will be the first fiction draft I run through this process deliberately. I hope, in the near future, to share more about that work, but now is not yet the time.

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