As a beginning writer, learning to critique the work of your peers in a writer's group may seem a daunting endeavor. Save the shivers and stomach cramps for the editors and publishers down the road. Critiquing is fairly painless and will aid you in your ability to edit your own work as well.

Someone once coined the term 'Oreo Cookie' critiquing. You sandwich a gentle, critical comment between two positive comments; it tastes better than having to swallow the negative comment alone. Both positive and negative input improves a writer's content, builds their confidence and bolsters their motivation to continue in their craft.

When beginning your critiquing skills, simply focus on three areas: flow, spelling/grammar and punctuation. Find a favorite item from each of these areas and learn to apply them. Always be honest.

FLOW
The storyline should move easily and logically.
You should get quickly involved and stay there till the end.
The facts should easily connect from paragraph to paragraph.
The dialogue needs to be realistic, not stilted or overly formal.

SPELLING/GRAMMAR
Always use your spell-checker.
Singular nouns need an apostrophe plus an 's' to form possessive.
Conjunctions need an apostrophe to replace the removed letter.
Double-check your homonyms; is it 'pail' or 'pale'? Giving your character a 'pail-face' might be embarrassing.

PUNCTUATION
Capitalize the first word in a sentence and only 'proper' nouns.
Periods end most sentences.
Always enclose quotes with quotation marks.
Keep dashes, exclamation marks and italics to a minimum.

Pick a pet peeve from each of the three areas above and put them into your critiquing toolbox. Don't overload yourself with rules and regulations but rather focus your energy on honing a few, simple critiquing skills.

Choose from the simple skills above to build stepping stones in your writing road, not stumbling blocks. Learn to embrace a certain amount of imperfection as part of humanity; even Hemingway and Asimov broke some rules and made mistakes.

Keep writing; practice makes 'more' perfect.