9/24 - 10/21

I ACTUALLY BOTHERED ANALYZING THINGS THIS TIME. WHEE. Some of them are a little lengthy. I may have seemed a bit down on you guys, because of the length and tendency towards "do ___ better" advice, BUT REALLY, I LOVE YOU ALL, AND YOU'RE DOING A GOOD JOB. 'sjust all WORK MODE AHAHAHA and I forget to smile.

alaskapigeon: $5,600
$3,200 Basic – The Moral High Ground You actually started out at a pretty Moderate level (excluding the plot summary—use that space and effort to make comments about why and how the plot works, not what the plot is), but slipped down to Basic at the end. BUT YOU CAN MAKE MODERATE. Try to keep up a consistently more story-specific and improvement-oriented grade focus. Read some of the advice on other graders… There’s not a lot of bulk to work with, for you.
$2,400 Basic – A Cock and Bull Story

Ataro: $7,000
$7,000 Moderate – So I Met This Guy John, Right? Nice job not overkilling a shorter story. XD

evanfardreamer: $2,600
$2,600 Basic – The Story of Leo You should never, ever fail someone based entirely on grammar. EVERRRRR. Especially at Easiest level. It’s one thing if their grammar is blatantly lazy, and they’re trying for a high level Mon and don’t have a plot that feels strong enough… Entirely another if “the rest of the story is fine” and it’s the lowest capture level. Grammar is a deciding factor only when the important aspects (plot and detail—or, rather, the story) are in question.

Kaioo: $27,300
$7,200 Basic – Judgment
$6,000 Moderate - Searching For Something Your reviews can be kindof… obtuse? sometimes. You repeat yourself a lot, and beat around the bush. While you do end up saying the same thing four times, it’s hard to tell exactly what that thing is, and what you want the writer to do with it. Consider embarking on a careful pruning adventure to make your advice more clear and precise. Alsoooo. Your grammar is messy. You have one sentence that’s six lines long, has somewhere around four incorrectly placed gerund phrases, and is a threefold run-on. Try to work on that, ‘cause if graders make a whole bunch of confusing grammatical errors, people who are looking to improve their grammar might have some issues. There was good advice in here, but it wasn’t accessible.
$3,200 Basic – A Fresh Start
$3,000 Basic – The Boy in the Scyther You say that the introduction is quite amazing over and over again—and then you mention that it could have used expansion. What does expansion entail? Why should he consider it, if his introduction is already quite amazing? Make the answers of these questions apparent to the writer.
$2,400 Basic – Native
$2,000 Basic – Tribal Wars Try to put talk a bit more about how the writer can improve what they’re doing, or think in different ways about how to write imagery, scenery, et cetera.
$1,000 Weak – Ruins of Ar’Keed This grade has the disadvantages of the Dreamweavers and Searching For Something grades. If I spliced out all of the sentences in which you repeat yourself without bringing a new idea to the table, the grade would be around a fourth of its current length. Try to condense your primary thoughts, and move them forward to a higher level of application: not just that you did well, but that, you did this well because. Try to hinge more on specific functions of the piece than your own general impression—talk about what, exactly, made you think so highly of the original nature of the plot, the detailed nature of the details, et cetera.
$0,800 Weak – Haunted I’m seeing a lot of the same phrases. Start suiting the grades directly to the story—encourage the writer to try new descriptive modes by asking questions about the detail; address the validity of the plot by asking any questions that you may have had as a reader, and talking about how, and why or why not they were answered; talk about the battle as a function of a climax, and whether or not the reader employed it properly as such. You talk a lot about how important plot is. Yes, that’s true. But don’t tell the writer how important a plot is if they have a strong plot—they know that the plot is important, clearly, because they’ve worked on their plot. Instead talk about their plot, not just the concept of plot.
$0,700 Weak – Dreamweavers This received Weak pay not because the analysis was not specific to the story, or because there was a lack of constructive writing-direction-related advice. What we have here is a lot of adjectives. They are positive adjectives—amazing, superb, interesting, and the like. That gives the writer a good idea of how he did. But. It doesn’t tell him what he did, how he did it, or why it happened. You want to give the writer an idea of what, exactly, he’s doing so well, and amazingly, and superbly. If he knows that, then he can make progress in his writing—improve upon what he does well, change up his weaker points, experiment with things he likes. Without specific feedback, there’s not much he can do on that end.

I AM GOING TO GIVE YOU A TASK. Your next few grades, do not use predicate adjective- or adverb- based phrases. Instead of “____ is *insert synonym for good/bad*,” or, “you wrote your plot well,” I command you to write specific, coherent explanations of what was good, and why it was good. If their plot twist blew your mind, tell them which particular plot twist did so, and what aspect of it did so, how that aspect did so, and why all of that is good. When put that way, it kindof sounds like I want you to overkill things to death—which I don’t. Practice moderation in what aspects you choose to talk about. But still, talk about specifics. I want to see you saying more than “you did really well here.”

You did a lot of hard work this month—nice going, and keep it up. ^_^

Scourge of Nemo: $55,000
$44,000 Extensive - Evils and Choices THREE MONTHS? REALLY? YOU SUCK.
$6,000 Moderate - Ain’t Nothing But a Houndour
$5,000 Moderate - Donate to a Relevant Charity After Reading This I JUST KEEP TELLING YOU, DON’T I? STOP OVERKILLING MAGIKARP STORIES.

Sorocoroto: $14,000
$14,000 Moderate - Arriving Home This writer is definitely at the level at which you should start doing a more in-depth analysis of his style and how he could consider switching things up a bit for improvement’s sake. Even if his main problem is grammar, a grader’s foremost job is to help writer’s improve—which entails telling them not just what they do wrong and what they do right, but why, and what other methods they could test out. Last wages, what I told you? That applies here. Make him aware of what he’s doing, what it means, what its flaws could be, how he can improve them.

Taras Bulba: $61,000
$23,000 Complex – Just Like Us Very cogent. The author had a point, and you addressed the piece in terms of this point. While there wasn’t a lot of specific “instruction,” high level analysis is highly useful to a writer who’s doing something like this—so good job, there. My hackles are raised a bit, however, by the fact that you roundaboutly termed the process “literature criticism.” Yeah, critical analysis is a large part of being a grader… but, the larger part of being a grader is helping writers get better at what they’re doing. You need to be careful to put away the literary critic lens when dealing with younger writers who have shorter works; while your grades are high quality analysis, they do not always encourage writing improvement in inexperienced writers. (That said, you didn’t have that downfall here. I bring it up because I’ve seen a trend in feedback about your grades.)
$10,000 Moderate – Everything to Gain When you have a story like this, that has a lot of elements you’re really happy with, try to talk about why they work, a bit. A Complex grade isn’t necessary at this level, but some of the specific plausibility bits you deal with are not as helpful as writer-specific “general observations” of trends. And as a grader, you should try to help the writer as much as possible by doing the things that are more helpful. Heh.
$9,000 Moderate – The Guardian of Voyagers-Chapter 3: Changes Inside and Out When you’re dealing with the more experienced writers, dig more into what the writer does stylistically, why the good bits work, and how they can improve upon that, or try new methods that could suit the style. This is a solid look at the story at a Moderate level—observations, yeses and nos, impressions. You do this at more complex levels for your other grades, which ups them to higher levels, depending on the nature of the story you’re grading. It’s good. But you should also start incorporating that higher level of technique/style/method improvement suggestions that I keep mentioning. It steps away from the technical functions of storytelling process and gets more into nuances of tone and atmosphere, et cetera.
$7,500 Moderate – Smudge Something happened here that also happened in your preLIFE grade. It’s a “I think you said blank, but when it comes down to it, what you actually said was very different” sort of grade. You have a strong grade, and you deal with a lot of important ideas and issues of the story—but when you come to the culmination of the grade, you essentially say “Your grammar was bad, so I have failed this story.” I got a strong impression that much of your reason for failure was the inconsistency of the character’s thought process as pertaining to his situation, in combination with “ummm… what?” aspects of the imagery, many of which were perpetuated by grammar. But because of your conclusion phrase, that wasn’t the message taken away from the venture. So, perhaps you might work on crystalizing those.
$6,000 Moderate – preLIFE My autocorrect keeps turning this into prolife. Oops? Anyway. I am torn on what to say about this grade. I think that, for the purposes of this story, the in-depth discussion of the plausibility of the science detracted from what you were attempting to say. It seemed to me that you were saying, “If you’re going to do this, do it right, and don’t use it as an excuse to avoid building a strong plot.” Which makes sense. But based on how you said that, it seemed, at first glance, that the grade failed the story based entirely on the fact that the science was flawed. I, at least, pulled out of it, “Your science takes precedence over your plot, and your science is wrong; that’s a massive flaw that puts the story on the edge. Plus, your grammar is lazy. SO NO CAPTURE.” But the grade itself seemed to be saying, “Your science and your grammar are wacky. No capture.” The clarity of the nuances there is the difference between a grade on which I say “good job” and a grade on which I have a massive, confusing paragraph about clarity.
That said, if it’s the first example, you have an issue with clarity; if it’s the second, SKETCHY GRADING METHOD. I hope it’s the first.
$5,500 Moderate – Night Shift Your grading style is really suited to the experienced, competent writers who know what they’re doing and need complicated feedback on how the particulars of their story come off to the readers. More inexperienced writers, not so much. This is the sort of fic where you should think about stepping away from your usual hardcore analysis and, er, use lots of smilies, or something. And focus more on what they did well. I don’t know about this particular writer… but a lot of the writers who’re doing stories around this length need a lot more “props” than “analyses”. It’s not like you should ignore their errors, grammatical or otherwise, but you should think about stating it in a more, “REALLY GOOD JOB HERE. It could’ve worked a bit better, though, if you’d done this instead, because of ____ reason. It doesn’t work quite as well, see?” Your tone is taken as highly negative by some more inexperienced writers, so be careful of that. (All that said, I’m using this fic as a case example based on length and whatnot, not the author as a case example of someone who has misunderstood something.)

All these massive paragraphs of advice and qualifications aside, I like your grades a lot. They make me want to bother finishing my current URPG fics, so I can wrangle a grade out of you. Writer-based adaptation is something you’ll need to work on, though. You need to take this into account. Talk to me if you want to know where any of it is coming from, ‘r something.

 

Thanks for this!

 

*claims* WHY THANK YOU, SCOURGE. I'll try not to suck so bad in the future. ^^

 

heh, I will try my best Scourge =D thanking you... *claims* =3

heh, I do need to go into more depth quite a bit *rubs head* X3

 

Claiming the money, will do better in the future. (Also more of them.)

 

Claiming, yeah, hopefully i'll be able to get back into grading more and better now that i'm backish

 

61,000?!
Good grief, I really did crank them out there, didn't I?
Claimed.