Why do some people get a lot of responses to their snippets and others get one or two?

I post sections of works and I rarely get more than one or two answers. While other work gets 10 or 12 responses. I'm not sure why that is. Does that happen to you? Is it frustrating?

Spec Tac2011-02-01T12:29:41Z

Favorite Answer

I think length, most importantly. A lot of people want to get in and out of a question quickly and won't take the time to do a full critique of more than a paragraph or so.

Not to mention, a lot (but certainly not all) of people here are new to writing or don't write much, and may not be able to offer much in the way of a critique beyond telling you if it interests them or not. There are other sites that are better for that. Goodreads is a site that lets you keep track of books you read and has a lot of groups, including a few writing groups that always provide good feedback. There are others too, Webook seems to be another good one.

Anonymous2011-02-01T20:15:51Z

The longer the question, the less people want to read it. And it amazes me how many people post a slab of text and think that it looks in any way appealing to the reader. Break it down into paragraphs, jeez. So yeah, some post small snippets while others have loads. So obviously the smaller one is quicker to read and will gain more answers.


=)

Anonymous2011-02-01T20:30:36Z

Some people have lots of friends here and they all respond to one another.

Sometimes people might read it and simply have nothing useful to say.

Sometimes it just doesn't appeal to them.

Sometimes someone else has already responded with basically what I would have said.

Sometimes something's so obviously cut out of the middle of a longer piece of work that I don't see any point in critiquing it with "I don't understand why this is happening".

Sometimes people don't leave blank lines between their paragrpahs, which I find very difficult to read onscreen even though there's nothing technically "wrong" with it.

Sometimes (and I'm not saying this is you) people post basically the same excerpt over and over and over again, and I'm not going to critique anything more than once.

Edit: I had a look at your past questions. Personally I'm going for "someone else already said what I'd have said" and "obviously taken out of the middle of something else" as reasons I don't seem to have critiqued you.

-ninja »neighbourhood pharmacy tech«2011-02-01T20:17:08Z

I haven't posted an excerpt in longer than I can remember. But I think it's because some people have a LOT of contacts, so their contacts may be more inclined to answer.

Maybe their excerpts are shorter.

Maybe their excerpts are just really bad and some people can't hold back what they want to say ;)

Etc.

ϕ-ɉʋɳǝƄʋg-ϕ iɳsiᵭǝ yoʋr ɱiɳᵭ2011-02-01T20:14:43Z

It could be the time you're posting them, or possibly the length of the post. I usually don't respond to very long critique questions, and I know a lot of other users don't either.

It also depends on how you ask the question. If you ask something that interests people, they're more likely to respond.

Show more answers (1)