Gabriella, you're far from dumb. 🙂 It's the fair thing to do. It's also a great time to have a referral network. You get to spread the wealth to friends who can handle the job. 🙂

Paula, good point. It's so hard when you're first starting out to get that the criticism is sometimes useful. Or not. Knowing the difference means trusting your gut a bit.

Like Cathy, I don't reply immediately. I take a little time to let it sink in and formulate a polite response.

When someone's criticism of you is way off base you can usually laugh it off. It only really hurts when the criticism is on target – and that's when you need to address it.

By all means, keep your cool when responding. Getting irate, insulting the client or challenging his or her opinion won't make you look any better, but acknowledging they pointed out an area for improvement just might. Thanking them for bringing it to your attention won't hurt, either.

Several years ago, I told a client who was perfectly willing to give me some work that I didn't specialize in that type of writing and didn't want to mislead them that I was. They'd have still given me the work if I hadn't told them I thought we should connect on the next project that was a better fit.

I've also told clients assigning an article on a particular topic that I know nothing about X or Y, being part of the topic, but that I'm really interested to learn. I've never had that come back in any negative way, and I feel much better going into projects with full disclosure of my skills.

All of that is a lead up to a point: My guess is that I head off some of that dumb-question criticism by letting clients know how dumb I am from the get-go! 🙂

I try to tell myself to digest first, respond afterwards. Of course, that assumes my response doesn't take too long. 😉