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Advice on Giving Advice

The majority of a tutor or critic's work is explaining to the person that you are helping what and how they can improve their work. But critiquing can often be a thankless job, and a lot of times you do not get to see the end result of your efforts, because most people progress slowly in learning to RP and write better. In order to try to make your jobs as easy as possible, here are some pointers from some of us who have spent years critiquing other people's hard work.

When Critiquing:
- No personal attacks!
- Say something nice first
- Warn if your critique is long or "brutal"
- Follow with things that need work
- End with some suggestions for new elements that could improve the work
- Refer writer to a guide or website containing more information
- Respond to rude comments with short posts or not at all
- Do not try to make every critique a novel: you'll burn out
- Try not to make your critique longer than the passage being critiqued

When being Critiqued:
- Be prepared for a brutal picking apart of your work
- Don’t take it personally! Separate yourself from your work
- Wait a while before asking for critique to give yourself some emotional distance
- Respond to each critique graciously or at least politely
- Thank people who have given you valid critiques
- Announce if you are going to submit a revised copy of the work

Not sure if I'm supposed to be responding in this thread, just let me know if I need to take it down, but here are some resources that I have come across during my time trawling the internet.

I will start with this link, that is actually a collection of 23 websites, all with excellent advice from a variety of topics.

100 Exquisite Adjectives

Synonym Finder, an easy and clean thesaurus.

Save the Words, and interesting site wherein you can browse through thousands of currently-unused words, learn their meaning and vow to attempt to revive them by using them in your conversations and writing.

EDIT: Got a response from the professor, here is the link with those exercises from the creative writing course.