Ooh, great article! Now I want to track down the one they reference as talking about different styles of writing workshop other than the Milford method.
I vaguely remember that when I was getting into betaing, one thing I did for practice was to go through actual published short stories from anthologies and do a sort of fake beta pass on them. It's imperfect because of course you can't ask the author questions and it's (hopefully) already been through a professional edit, but I think it gives good practice, especially since you can do multiple passes in different ways and kind of train yourself to notice, like -- here's the pass where I did a full "this is how I would have done it" like some writers in feedback groups tend to do, here's one where I only did "this passage or phrasing confused me", noticing the differences in how you handled it each time.
Thinking out loud, I wonder if a community for some sort of beta-reading practice could be beneficial? I feel like it might need to be pretty heavily modded to counteract the influence of Milford as default, but putting up a short public-domain or volunteer-submitted passage maybe once a week and everyone being able to kind of... submit homework of how they would beta it, read each other's beta passes, and discuss the different takes and viewpoints that would come out of that?
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-03-03 07:03 pm (UTC)I vaguely remember that when I was getting into betaing, one thing I did for practice was to go through actual published short stories from anthologies and do a sort of fake beta pass on them. It's imperfect because of course you can't ask the author questions and it's (hopefully) already been through a professional edit, but I think it gives good practice, especially since you can do multiple passes in different ways and kind of train yourself to notice, like -- here's the pass where I did a full "this is how I would have done it" like some writers in feedback groups tend to do, here's one where I only did "this passage or phrasing confused me", noticing the differences in how you handled it each time.
Thinking out loud, I wonder if a community for some sort of beta-reading practice could be beneficial? I feel like it might need to be pretty heavily modded to counteract the influence of Milford as default, but putting up a short public-domain or volunteer-submitted passage maybe once a week and everyone being able to kind of... submit homework of how they would beta it, read each other's beta passes, and discuss the different takes and viewpoints that would come out of that?