Pwolf wrote:What if there is nothing positive to say?
I'm not stating that everyone must
always give constructive criticism. I'm just stating what it is, as far as I've learned.
Simply pointing out something positive which has nothing to do with the the things you're offering advise on is redundant and pointless.
I'm not sure how it's redundant, unless many other people tell them the same thing over and over again. But I'm not taking this as a group discussion, just a one on one.
As far as being pointless, I don't think it is. Doing so at least gives the person some kind of idea that they might have done at least one thing right. If all you do is point out everything they did wrong, then they could just easily assume they did only wrong things. Letting them know what they did right might keep them from making a mistake on it in the future.
Very rarely have I seen a video that has done only "wrong" things. So, the situation of "what if they did only bad things" is an extremely unlikely "black and white" situation. In my belief there are only "shades of gray".
From an AMV standpoint, it helps no one to provide constructive criticism for a video that you think is rather awful all around then say "Oh, but the sound quality was great!"It doesn't serve any constructive purpose to point that out just because, under your definition, in order to provide constructive criticism, you must say something positive about what is being criticized.
For fear of sounding horridly redundant, it does help because at least then they know they did that right and then they can repeat the steps they took to make good sound quality on their next video. If they didn't know they did it right, then maybe they will botch it up.
"Well your audio didn't sound hollow or tinny, so that is good."
Besides if someone is asking me for a full opinion on something I will go and comment on just about every aspect of the video if I can.
Constructive criticism in of itself is meant to be positive already.
Well at least we can agree on that point.
I find critism constructive whenever someone explains WHY something was bad instead of simply saying that it's bad without giving any inside.
This to me is just what I call good criticism. Explanations on both good and bad are always more helpful than just stating "this is bad" or "this is good".
As I stated above, I'm not stating how people should give criticism, I'm just stating my definition of constructive criticism. It should be balanced.
If people want to flame or if people want to kiss ass, then that's their problem. Either way how it gets taken is up to the person who is receiving the criticism it doesn't matter if it was constructive or not.