Anti-Duplication may prohibit specific questions regarding critiques

Question

Anti-Duplication may prohibit specific questions regarding critiques.

I am debating whether or not if SE is a good place or not to receive critical writing advise on work of my own. Most of the time I refer to work as small written exercises.

I like the idea of forcing the poster to carefully phrase a question regarding the critique request, because it forces the poster to understand what s/he is asking, and whether or not if the written work makes sense to post for that specific question.

However, I believe that if posters post similar questions for different pieces of work, that might fall under the category of duplication and only the first poster remains posted. I assume that duplication leads to closed.

In theory, less than a few hundred posts could cover all possible questions regarding general critiques. Thus, only a few hundred would be given the service of their work being critiqued in the realm of their specific question.

Is there an aspect of asking an appropriate critique specific question I am missing?

Answer 1

We accepted critique questions for a long time, but in the end we found that they are not a good fit for this site and so critique questions are no longer accepted. You can certainly use your work to provide examples to illustrate the question you want to ask, but the question should be, first and foremost, about the writing question you have, not about your work specifically.

If you ask a question about, say, capturing the fast pace of a back-and-forth dialogue in writing, and somebody else has asked that same question, it'll be closed as a duplicate. That's ok, and the way Stack Exchange is designed to work. If the previous question got helpful answers, wouldn't you rather jump straight to those anyway?

If you ask a question about, say, making your dialogue more realistic, and then ask another one about writing evocative scene descriptions, and both of those questions happen to use examples from the same passage, that's ok -- the questions are different, so any duplication in the example passages doesn't matter. Feel free to ask as many distinct questions drawn from the same work as you'd like.

Remember that these aren't critiques; a good answer won't be "here's what I think about your passage" but, rather, "here's how to do whatever thing you're asking about". Answers may suggest rewrites of your example or they may use completely different examples to illustrate their points. People here tend to do the former more than the latter, from what I've seen, so you may get some critique-like feedback as a side-effect, but the main point is the writing question.