The same for academic work! There are 1000 ways to give critical feedback to someone w out being nasty. The ways that nasty reviews stay in my mind... I've received 500+ peer reviews at this point & STILL remember the one that said I did work "in the worst and least imaginative way possible"

I just had to write a negative review, and it was 10x harder than writing a positive one...it's a really delicate thing to convince someone they are going to need to revisit some of the premises of the paper (which will require a lot of work) but not be soul crushing.

Why does one's approach need to be "imaginative!?!" We're doing science, not creative writing!!!

I've been in this game much less time than you, but I will always remember a review I received saying that the paper was not worth publication anywhere and that we should "post it on their personal web servers so that people will know not to pursue that fruitless path in the future."

my personal fave of my own was a five-line review I got from APJS that included the phrase "useless stuff from yet another American politics quantoid"