Meredith Mansfield, Author

What I call knee-jerk critiques occur when a critiquing partner has just internalized one of the “rules” of good writing.  You can tell when this has happened because every third or fourth comment is the same.  “Avoid -ly adverbs.”  “Watch out for said bookisms.”  “You’ve used passive voice.  Make it active.” 

I put the word rules in quotation marks above because, while these guidelines represent best practices to a large extent, there isn’t one that hasn’t been broken to good effect in the right circumstances.  Barring basic grammar and spelling, of course.

It is always better to use a strong verb instead of a weaker verb and an adverb.  “Strolled”, “ambled”, or “trudged” convey more than “walked slowly”, but not all adverbs are necessarily the work of the devil.  Used sparingly, they still have a place. 

Contrary to the rule above (just to show that there always is an exception), it is almost always better to use “said” or “asked” in dialog tags, rather than the stronger verbs like “whispered”, “screamed”, “commented”, “suggested”, “whined”, etc.   In this case, you don’t want to keep the tag simple so that it doesn’t detract from the dialog.  Then again, sometimes the fact that the character is whining might be the point and more important than what they’re saying.

Passive voice is my least favorite because half the time the segment that’s marked by the critiquer isn’t even in passive voice.  It might be in, say, past perfect tense, but that’s not passive voice.  And again, while I recognize that active voice is more interesting, I might choose to subliminally emphasize my character’s helplessness in a situation by using passive voice for a short section.

The only problem with these knee-jerk critiques is that after a while they generate so much white noise that it’s hard to sort out the valuable comments.   

It’s a fine line.  Like anyone else, I’m capable of slipping back into bad habits and, say, using a said bookism when I didn’t intend to.  I appreciate having that pointed out to me.  But I guess you only need to point out the same thing just so many times in any one critique.  Too much, even of a good thing, can be distracting.