To critique, or not to critique

[plonq]

Somebody posted a story to one of the mailing lists that I follow, and I'm thinking about critiquing it for him.  I say that I am thinking about it because I'm not sure how he will react.  It has been my experience that some writers in this genre are pretty touchy about getting back anything but praise.  ("If u HATED my story SO MUCH then why did u READ it?????")

The reason I am thinking of giving this one a critique is because of his comments at the end: "In the end i hope this to be a rather long story, maybee even get published by some small company, titled: A Journey Throught the Mind of a Furry... or something like that."

In its current form his story is not likely to even get read, let alone published.  It's apparently his first attempt, so I don't want to wade in and savage the poor kid's story, but he's managed to ignore some pretty fundamental elements of writing.  Here is a summary of what I am thinking of sending to the list:

1) Read this site.
2) Add some strategic paragraph breaks.
3) Repost.

Helpful Plonq wants to give some constructive feedback, but Grumpy Plonq doesn't feel like wading through a solid block of text to do so.

Comments

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Ah, one of those stinging critiques that says, "There is probably a good story hidden somewhere in this tossed salad of words. I'd like to read it some day after you learn to write."

I had a friend who was pretty brutal in critiquing my work, and I got my back up more than once over his rebukes. The things for which he took me to task had been learned through the experience of having manuscripts rejected for those selfsame sins though, so I generally heeded his advice.

I learned later that he was virtually quoting verbatim from Elements of Style.