Looking at your own calligraphy for too long can make every line blur together. One minute it looks good, the other minute it looks terrible, and that is not very helpful either way. You do need a little feedback when you are starting out. Just don’t use the same kind of feedback you always get. Instead, tell them to do something. The most useful feedback will be visible. It will help a beginner focus on one specific thing in a page of their practice: Is there a way to change the slant, or to adjust the spacing, or change the height of the ascenders, or even just to adjust how thick the downstrokes should be. The less vague the feedback is, the more it feels like a tool rather than a critique.
It is a good place to start with self-feedback. That is easy to do every single time you practice. After practicing a letter or a short word a row at a time, you need to take a pause. Look at two things at once: either shape and spacing, or pressure and slant. If you try to look at a whole page at once, your hand won’t be as likely to learn. Instead, look for specific things that need improving: Are the ovals as round as possible? Do the entry strokes start at the same height? Is the gap between each letter getting bigger or smaller on the second half of the word? The more you can look closely, the better you will be able to notice, and that is one of the most important things for beginner calligraphy students to learn.
When someone gives you feedback, it is more helpful when you bring a specific question. Instead of showing someone a whole page to show that it needs work, show them one single line of text and ask: Does the pressure change from downstroke to downstroke? Is the baseline moving? Are the joins between the letters coming together? It helps to get a response that you can actually use. A typical mistake that people can make is trying to fix everything they were told in the next page. It usually results in the most boring, stiff writing, because your hand is now trying to listen to every possible instruction all at once. The next step is usually easier to manage if you try fixing one thing over the entire session you have. Sometimes depth is more useful than breadth when you’re correcting yourself.
It matters what you do when you receive a note that you have noticed. If your letter is too narrow or your upstrokes are too light, it doesn’t mean the entire style is wrong. Sometimes your feedback will be that you should switch styles. But more often than not, that isn’t very useful. Feedback shouldn’t erase your work. If your downstrokes are heavy, it does not mean you need to start over from nothing. Don’t switch styles. Just adjust. When a letter gets a little clearer and a bit sharper, your style will get a little stronger. A good style doesn’t grow by trying to be everything at once.
A fifteen minute feedback session can be a good amount of time. Spend the first few minutes rewriting the exact letter or word where the issue appeared. Then spend the middle part on a drill that isolates the problem. If the note you got was that your letters were too spaced out, spend a few minutes practicing letter pairs, paying closer attention to the white space: na, an, no, on. If it was that the downstrokes had different pressures, do a series of long downstrokes, and then some gentle lifts, before you get back to the letters. Spend the last bit of your session trying to rewrite the same letters you did earlier to see how they changed. It is important to be able to see the feedback. And when you see the correction happen, practice becomes a lot less frustrating, and becomes something you are doing on purpose, rather than just happening to you.
Over time, feedback is less about how to change one specific page and more about how you notice when a pattern happens in advance. You start noticing when a slant is drifting, or when you space letters more closely together because you are writing faster. That is when you can go from mindlessly practicing to purposefully practicing. Calligraphy is your own work. The better you learn to respond to feedback, the more your writing will reflect the way you intend to, and that is where character will start to emerge.