I found Does Writers.SE accept critique requests? and agreed with it. This SE site does best as a Q/A site for questions on specific questions that are generally applicable to some writing discipline (and, therefore, searchable and reusable).
I want to propose that we don't stop by just rejecting critiquing questions. I think we should take it a step further, and do what the programming community on SE has done; create a specific SE site for critiquing. The SE site for this in relation to programming is called Code Review
. Maybe we could create a similar site for writers and develop an online Writer's Circle
full of expert advice and feedback?
I think this could be useful for two reasons:
- Often, learning must happen experientially before a concept can truly be understood. This would expand the options people have for getting that experience by giving them an online community that is of the excellent caliber that Stack Exchange sites are known for.
- Knowledge and insight can be gained through browsing critiques of other people's writing. This site,
Writers
, takes the bottom up approach; find answers to specific problems and questions and incorporate them into you writing style. A critiquing site is more of a top-down approach to learning where you can read critiques and (after a while) get a general sense for what good and bad writing looks like from within the context of a community that actually knows what they are talking about.