 Contests & Activities: October 23, 2013 Issue [#5920] |
  Contests & Activities
This week: Be a Gracious Contest Entry Reviewer Edited by: NaNoNette  
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There was a day, last week or a decade ago, that you typed "writing" into your search engine. You wanted to show off some of your poems, short stories, or maybe even get feedback for a whole novel. You found Writing.com.
On this site, you found all that you searched for: Portfolio space, helpful reviewers, encouraging groups, style and grammar lessons from peers. Nothing prepared you for the amazing bounty of: Contests & Activities! |
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Be a Gracious Contest Entry Reviewer
Review like a reader, not like a professor.
So, you have a contest and there are several entries that fulfilled the basic requirements you gave them. They entered their story by or before the deadline. They gave you a word count. They followed your prompt.
Now, you have to decide which stories take the cake.
As a reviewer, you are always 100% entitled to your opinion. That is what reviewing is all about after all. It's to give a writer an opportunity to "see" their writing through the eyes of another person. This means that there is virtually no wrong way to review. As long as you read the whole piece and your comments show the writer that you gave the story some thought, your comments will be valuable for the writer.
Where does the gracious come in? I'm glad you asked.
On this site, which has writers of all skill levels and from all the different English speaking parts of the world, cut other writers some slack. If you know for a fact that something is worng (like that word) - by all means point it out. These things can get overseen easily and a reviewer does a writer a good service by pointing it out.
However, should you really penalize somebody for things like passive voice, or phrases and sentences that you wouldn't use? Or, worse, for writing in an English flavor or flavour that you don't favor?  Let writers keep their own voice. Allow the images that they create for you to come at you even if it means you have to look away from the screen because there was a glaring grammar or spelling mistake. Let the writer describe something in narration without needing to be shown everything. Stretch your imagination. But - also let the writer know when you absolutely don't connect with their story and you don't "see" anything.
Again, as a contest host, you are the king/queen of you contest. You can choose though to be hypercritical about everything to a point where a writer feels they'll never get it right because their voice, their style, their imagination doesn't fit yours. As long as a text doesn't offend you through its theme or excessive mistakes that make the writing appear sloppy, just give the story a chance. How well did it fit your prompt? How imaginative or amazing did they make it?
If you have a contest that regularly attracts several entries, then you really are a lucky host. This gives you a wide variety of stories to enjoy and award the best of them. Even those that don't blow you away were written by a writer with a fragile ego. No trophy - we can all handle that. Being told our writing is in need of some grammar and spelling fixes - every writer needs to go through that. Reading a review that zeroes in on one bad thing and nothing else, that's the stuff that'll make writers stop being writers. Don't be the reviewer or contest host who causes that.
Host on and review on. And write on too.
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