Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

One essential I found when I used to attend creative writing courses at the local evening school was that what people expect from criticism varies an awful lot, even if they say they want 'constructive criticism', and it helps if you can figure that out in advance.

Even in an explicitly learning environment, the ambition varies hugely, most don't want constructive criticism to go any further than "I liked that", a few want some actual analysis, and a handful want full on 'this didn't work, because' crits. Fan writing probably gets a different skew on the percentages, but the different groups will definitely exist. Figuring out which group people belong to is the (occasionally impossible in advance) trick.

'Know your audience' applies to critting fiction as well as to writing it.