If you are reviewing someone's work, don't be unnecessarily harsh or cruel. Someone spent time and energy on that piece of writing you're reviewing, and that person has feelings. Even if you think the piece is terrible... even if you think the writer wasted your time as a reader... your job as a reviewer is to be constructively critical rather than cruelly critical. You shouldn't be trying to tear someone down and the takeaway from your review definitely shouldn't be that they're beyond hope and might as well quit writing altogether.

If you are having your work reviewed, you need to have a thick skin. Not every reviewer will take the last statement into consideration and some people are just plain blunt, unhelpful, or even downright nasty. Part of being a writer is putting your work out in the world and having other people read it and make judgments about its quality. The most important thing to remember is that even the harshest, nastiest, most mean-spirited feedback is feedback a response to what you've written. You need to separate your own self-worth from the worth you assign to your work. A negative reaction to your work is not necessarily the same thing as a negative reaction to you. Writers need thick skin to stand up to the criticism they're going to receive, so please try not to convince yourself that you're either wholly great or entirely terrible as a writer based on a limited sample of feedback to one thing you've written.