Feedback

Should be positive.

- Clifford Martis

Feedback is a bit of a funny word. Very useful but my first reaction was imagining feeding someone with something he or she has thrown up. Angry mothers sometimes say, “Eat it or I will thrust it down your throat.” But of course now the term is being used to describe various important and useful things like response, reaction, suggestions and such other helpful matters.

When we have an occasion to offer a feedback on a paper or plan or project prepared by someone we should look at the positive side first. Imagine that someone has prepared a write-up which is poor and needs a lot of improvement. But the handwriting is so nice. We can start appreciating the handwriting and then proceed to analyse the not-so-fine matters dealt with by the author or the way he or she has presented them. Our method should be putting the better brighter aspects to the one who seeks our response and then pacing our criticism to his mind and asking him how he feels about our suggestion.

Be courteous. We should always be courteous in our remarks and criticisms. If a point made by the author appears silly we should not say so in so many words. We can ask him to imagine what the reader might feel on reading his point.

I remember a serious incident. While in high school, we had a student who was given to using bombastic words in his compositions. On one occasion the teacher got so irritated that he threw the student’s notebook out of the window. Anyone will agree that this is not the way to deal with the matter. The teacher should have explained the importance of using simple words in the place of bombastic words and asked him to rewrite the composition.