FAKKU Writers' Lounge

Hahahaha xD

Well, time to work on part two of my cthulhu inspired story. I love it!

Best of luck brah =D

Will do :3

Precisely High! And I guess Vega gets the idea too lol. It doesn't matter what kind of smile you carry, a sincere smile can touch the hearts of many.

I feel flattered by that sir =)

I guess that might make sense

So much complaining about the judging lol.


[7/16/2012 11:11:29 AM] Nikon: In all reality, if someone doesn't care enough to write properly, they shouldn't have bothered entering.

I thought it was a civil discussion!

I wouldn't say complaining. and I really don't mind the judging. I rather enjoy how it is ^^

I see those two's words as complaining.

I see it as neutral. i meant no offense.

Most of the complaining was more of High and Mibu saying that they would fail at judging lol

Besides questioning the system or not (which I think works suitably), the contest seems to be a great hit.

Not just the system, but also trying to bash the very spirit of fierce competition.

Not everyone writes for fun. I could be more than that. It could be passion. It could be wish to win.

If you don't understand it, don't even bother to joke... which doesn't exactly sound like a joke. Just labeled as one immediately to avoid any predicament.

Actually, no. Writing for the sake of victory is nice and all, but it is never more than writing for fun. It should never come before the fun itself.

The author gave birth to that work. He is the god of that world, he gave it existence.

So what? If it doesn't win, or if it's , you would disapprove of its existence? That which is born from your feelings and ideas? You would deny a part of your mind?

If that's really the case, as implied by writing for anything else is MORE than writing for the fun of writing, I suggest you to reflect on why you do anything at all.

Because relevant and I started reading OP from this arc: http://www.mangareader.net/103-2463-16/one-piece/chapter-356.html

This is regarding the competition, and I'm pretty certain that some people joined to win. I don't think everyone who joined it, wrote for fun, albeit they did have fun in the end.

Let's just leave him entitled to his own opinion Mibu~

While it's true that we ourselves wanna write for fun, it's not really our business to care about those who only wanted to compete let them have their own set of fun while we will just look the other way~

You can ask me to elaborate about it if you want. I had my set of answers waiting

Sorry I haven't posted here often enough, everyone. I enjoyed that video you posted back a while, high, on the BBC writers talking about writing. Seeing Dilbert sure takes me back, what a great show. The Steam summer sale is also getting to me as well. So many good deals. (By the way, xnine, you can choose to wait until the sale is almost over, but that's the only prediction I can give. I believe all sales end tonight at midnight, maybe PDT time.)

Anyway, I liked the general discussion of things on judging. But Rise asked that I comment on it so you guys can get some input from someone who has judged one of our contests.

Judging is very difficult, it absolutely is. At the same time, the judges must all be near a caliber enough to understand writing and how to analyze it and must also have the sense of duty to read everyone's piece very closely because of how much work they may have put into it. However, the judges don't have to be flawless. Rise's writing has improved very much since I first met him, but his writing skill wasn't as good as it was now when he helped me judge the winter one. However, he was still a judge because he had such a strength in organizing forum events and it is obvious from the current contest's prizes that he's only getting better. I could not do some of the stuff that he has in this area, despite my level of interest in writing. However, Rise is also only getting better at his writing (as long as he learns to continue to back his work up so we can read the rest of it) so it makes him an ideal example of someone to judge a specific contest who may not be an expert in the area.

Like high was saying, why not have like-minded people instead of people with different strengths, well you need both. All the judges need to know how to read and understand writing, but they also need their strengths so that they can compliment each other, which is why I stand behind a diverse board of judges. I suppose you might have heard the saying "Jack of all trades, master of none." In the winter, I needed Rise's organizational forum help and someone who understands plot and story development a bit better than I do, in addition to someone who understands the more poetical side of things (this, I counted on tsuyoshiro for), which is honestly not near my strength. I think on a very systematic view of writings. In general, I can read underlying themes fairly well, but it is so much easier for me to focus on spelling and grammar because of how I read and write. I have a word document of every entry in the winter with all of my fixes to spelling and grammatical structure on every piece. I catch nearly everything, as long as I'm aware of it, obviously. That is not to say that I deduct "points" because of those mistakes, but they do come into the equation.

It's a very difficult thing to judge subjective works. How does one win an art contest just as well as a writing one? High, you say this isn't English class, but think about why there even is an English class when anyone can write to their own rhythm? Why are there art schools when art is purely subjective? This is because you may lack the necessary skills and techniques to carry you further as an artist or writer. This isn't English class, but think about how else you would grade entries to a Writing contest. Mibu, you may think it's dumb to "grade" writings on "points" but how would you judge 68-70 works when the effort could be about the same in each? Honestly, we don't grade on points and we don't use a point system. Out of four writing contests, only one used points and that was the Valentines contest of 2010. People didn't like it, but Noel wanted to do it that way.

To make it a bit more easy to relate to, let's say you must choose which is a better entry: the one about courage, or the one about sacrifice. They both appear well-written and both have great underlying themes and lessons. However, this is a contest with one prize. Let's say you choose the one about courage. The writer of the one about sacrifice says "How dare you, I put effort into that. How can you say their's is better than mine?" What would you tell him? You felt it easier to relate to personally? That's not how you should judge a contest, you'll just be picking favorites. You could say you felt they exemplified courage better than he represented sacrifice or that their character developed more, but that is also very subjective and also somewhat picking favorites, on themes or people. But if I look through his piece and say, "Well, you didn't really understand the use of tense changes, you occasionally switch from third to first person in inappropriate situations, and I can find a few misspellings. You started a sentence with a conjunction and you should use a semicolon here because your sentence needed to be spliced." Are they going to tell you you're wrong? They can't say you're wrong, you both are abiding by the laws of English and he can't rightfully say his piece doesn't do the things you've stated if it's true.

Now, that's not the only thing that we graded on in the winter, but that is how we sorted out the majority of them. After we identified the ones we felt were the highest caliber according to the proper use of the English language, I marked down all the errors I caught, and we discussed them each individually, about themes and plots, confusion and such. I can't say that method is flawless, but we didn't use invisible numbers and did the best we could.

If I were to choose the most important trait a judge should have, I would probably choose either commitment or a sense of duty to read every entry as in-depth as the last. Contests can have a lot of entries and take a long time and can't be dropped off randomly like an RP when there are prizes and people waiting on decisions. It helps to have someone who can dissect English structure and spelling/grammar mistakes, but if none of them are the above, then the contest simply can't happen. However, that's just one ingredient of the awesome omelet that makes up the judges, the contests, and the fun times for our section.

P.S. Rise, you shouldn't take what they say as an insult to your judging or as complaining, but merely as a discussion of honest feedback on frustrations and, honestly, good feedback to take into consideration for the next contest. The end goal for all of this, after all, is to grow the section so we can have more quality people in the community to help each other out.

TL;DR - Read it, you lazy, uncommitted, non-judge-material forum user. (Totally a sarcastic joke, don't take that seriously.)

I mean it

Yeah it's tl;dr but I read it anyway~

No comment man, we probably just meant to joke around with you guys anyway because we felt bored. Seeing as we kinda make fun of ourselves about we being inept as judges =)))



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