Constructive Criticism

One of my friends already wrote a blog post regarding getting decent feedback from people. I don't care, I'm going to do it anyway.

I really hate the phrase "I liked it". More often than not, whenever I'm working with peer review groups, 90% of what people say to each other are "I liked it" or "it was good" or maybe, if they're feeling ambitious, "I liked the way you..."

That's all good and well, and I understand that people want to be careful not to rip on people and make them feel bad, but come revising time, the only comments that help are the negative ones. Because they point out something wrong, which you can then make better. The past few times I've sat down to revise, I've had next to no commentary to help me, and I've ended up just changing things because I'm not sure what to revise. It's somewhat frustrating.