Here are my thoughts about criticism in general and about criticism over writing in particular. I believe that a one-size-fits-all approach can only be an unfair attack on a lot of people. When it comes to literary skills, it would be wrong, in my opinion, to judge and criticize, for instance,  a blogger, a newspaper journalist and a novelist, using the same yardstick. I'd expect the highest standards from the newspaper journalist as I'm not buying the newspaper to read 'his/her' writing. I'm buying it to read news presented in a coherent and correct manner.  If the journo writes terribly, he/she is spoiling my experience of reading a newspaper and I'd reserve my harshest criticism for him/her.  A novelist? I am buying a novel to read a certain author's work, and if I don't approve of his/her writing, I can just junk the book or write a letter of protest, which will in all likely-hood be consigned to trash by the author in question. A blogger? He/she is a person who is writing for pleasure, their own and possibly that of whoever happens to read their posts.  They are not paid to do it and they rarely even get comments and positive feedback, even from people who enjoy reading their posts, so should they be subject to ridicule and discouragement when a reader does not like their work?


A friend on fb wrote this post, titled 'How Not to Write Badly' (http://satyakiroy.posterous.com/how-to-not-write-badly). I'd have to ask you, my reader, to read it, as the rest of my post would not make sense otherwise.

Done? Good. Now, his post did specify if it was aimed at a particular set of people. Wannabe novelists? Bloggers? Journos with bad writing skills who serve the occasional bowl of howlers with a main course of pain? Satyaki Roy writes very well and seems to write from his heart.  Only, I felt that he was a little off, actually, more than a little off, with his views.  I know how people tend to feel about personal views, and criticism on it, but since his post was a critique in itself, AND he was a friend, I thought I'd post what I felt about it. 
I wrote:

I started to read this post with interest as i wanted to see what your thoughts were. However, the vitriol was so strong that my gag reflex could barely be suppressed. You write very well, but frankly, this was churlish at best. You claim discouraging individuals who write poorly as a right? You've got to be kidding me! Are you trying to compete with Muammar Gaddafi or Shelley's Ozymandias? I had a friend once who blogged a lot, but in SMS-speak. No capitalization anywhere (not even for the personal pronoun 'I'), incorrect and inconsistent punctuation, riddled with typos even an Albanian spell-check program would flag and more. I pointed them all out to her instead of just telling her to stop!
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Chetan Bhagat pisses me off immensely, but that is precisely why I stopped reading his books after tolerating one and attempting to read another one with an open mind. Nobody is compelling you or me to read it. Even if an extract from a Chetan Bhagat story were to make its way into an English textbook for students in India, I'd review the actual content before screaming hoarse. Even the Vogons found an Arthur Dent who appreciated their poetry! A friend of mine regularly posts recipes with photographs and finds a lot of takers for it. I like it too, sometimes. We still are a free country, Satyaki, and nobody is forcing stuff down your throat. If you see a banana peel on the ground in front of you, what do you do? Do you sidestep it or do you go "Just my luck! I have to slip and fall down again" ?

He replied in a little while, pointing out that if I'd lived by what I was preaching, I'd have ignored his views too, which led me to tell him why it was that I felt compelled to 'correct' him, a word that was probably not the most appropriate one to convey my intentions and it might have seemed harsh to him.  We parried back and forth for a while, each failing to convince the other about why his version of the criticism was justifiable while the other's was not.  While no harsh words were exchanged,  I chose to end the discussion right there, when he called my criticism 'an apology for mediocrity'. 

If I'd ended the conversation then, why am I raking it up again now? Perhaps because it affected me more than I thought it would.  Perhaps the fact that he reads a lot and writes very well gave me hopes about many more of his entire generation (he is a few summers younger than I am) being more erudite than I suspected, and his seeming lack of tolerance for his less talented peers dashed my hopes.
Or perhaps, there was some truth in his accusation after all, that I was tendering an apology for mediocrity.
However, I don't believe that I was tendering an apology for mediocrity. Perhaps, what I really was doing, was going out to bat for my own kind, people who've been tagged as mediocre by a lot of people and who've got sick of that tag. Yes, that's probably the real reason why it affected me so much.

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