Although most of our members live in Utah, some live in other states. We try to have at least one gathering a year in Salt Lake City, usually at a writing conference. Thus, for our regular critique sessions, we depend upon the Internet to exchange and review each other's writing.

1. On the 1st and 16th of each month the session leader (usually the president or V.P.) sends email invitations to those members interested in joining our current critique sessions. Each session is numbered to make it easy to identify sessions. Members have three or four days to respond to invitation if they plan to participate; members provide the session leader with the working title of their project and the genre.

2. Session leader creates a small spreadsheet with each participant's first name, email, name of submission, and group. Depending on how many attend the session, we divide the participants into two, three, or four groups. When feasible, the groups are separated by genre. Each group contains from three to six participants.

3. After participants receive the spreadsheet, they have two days to share their documents with members in their group via email. Soon they receive submissions from others in the same group. Everyone saves these submissions to their computer for review and comments. (Some of us create a new folder for every critique session and save all files there.)

4. This system generally gives participants ten days to review the documents sent by fellow members. Because the word limit is 3,200, the pieces submitted don't take too long to review. Some submissions are only 1,000-word flash stories.

5. Reviewers use Tracking Changes to demonstrate changes they think the author should make and they use Comments to ask questions, give praise, offer suggestions, etc. Reviewers can also highlight and enter comments inline. We like to see five to ten (or more) comments or suggestions per submission.

For comment ideas, you can download these critique & review guidelines: InkedVoices Critique Sheet and JustWrite_CritiqueSheet.

6. Reviewers add their name or initials to the submission file name before returning it to the author; this way authors can store all reviews of that submission in the same folder or directory on their computer. To help reviewers keep track of the docs they've completed and returned, the session spreadsheet contains a column for entering the return date.

7. Reviews should be returned to the authors by midnight on the last day of the session (either the 15th or the last day of the month). The president or V.P. sends participants a reminder at session end.

Click to download a copy of our Critique Session Guidelines.
(Note: We do not use Google Docs.)