Is 3 out of 6 bad?

July 12, 2009

It appears I'm batting 50% with my first 6 submissions. That's a whale of a batting average, but otherwise a failing grade almost anywhere else. Although I suppose a PGA golfer would be ecstatic to win 3 of 6 tournaments. For those of you who are thinking of submitting read carefully the fine print and purpose of this site. There are high standards, and although I must admit to being a bit miffed at "rejection", it's a very good thing those standards are upheld. I had to remind myself that one of the reasons I started coming here were those very same standrds. Time to roll up the sleeves and work on the writing. Enough of that, on to another bit of advice.
Any writer out there already knows this, but consider it a cautionary tale and a refresher for those who already know. Don't submit the last copy of anything you have written. Why do I say that? Because I deleted some reviews from a competing web site and submitted them here without backing them up. Brilliant you say? Yes, it was less than stellar. In the day and age of computers this should not happen if you have half a brain. Unfortunately, we humans on occasion operate on less than half a brain, in fact I manage to operate on zero brains much more often that I like.
So kids, remember to back up your documents, and don't be foolish like Uncle JS here. I'll be back soon with some reworked reviews, ready to receive the incoming 120mm rejection mortar. Now, where's my pen (mightier than the sword?) and my kevlar...

JS

Feedback

Felix_Arabia - July 12, 2009 (04:27 PM)
The website saves every review submitted regardless of whether it is accepted or rejected. You just need to know the review ID number and you can retrieve any work you thought you lost. Just click on a review and change the link's number and you'll find it soon enough.

aschultz - July 12, 2009 (04:30 PM)
Maybe archive.org has the original reviews. If you don't remember the address, check your old contributor page at archive.org. Also, if you have a browser history, maybe you can check to see what the previewed review looks like. What Felix said. I don't know why I didn't think of that, but with his info I can figure one of your reviews must be here and for the others, you can try 8215, 8216, 8210 or 8209. (And on a related note, that explains why we're at review 8000+ but the random-read blurb only says 6000+.)

It takes time to get a checklist of stuff you need in a review to be confident it's good enough. After a few times it'll seem natural enough. Things Zigfried mentioned like paragraph length, while it doesn't affect the information in your review, can affect if people are trying to read it. It may be worth leaving your review for a couple hours and coming back to it to see if anything big sticks out. One of the things I like to do is imagine if someone I hate wrote what I did. Would I be persuaded? Where can I poke holes? To me, it adds a little fun to proofreading.

Proofreading should eventually be about ideas and not grammar. While it's tough to finger long sentences, I think OpenOffice has a free grammar checker, and Microsoft Word, if you have it, has something good enough. It's not exactly cutting work--it's freeing you up for the creative bits.

A lot of what review writers do here is probably something we stopped being aware of a few years ago--it just seems natural to do it this way or that. But if you ask around you'll be able to learn, and by reading theirs, you'll probably osmose a lot, too.

BTW, if you do decide to write the reviews from scratch, take heart that the most memorable stuff for you will probably be the most memorable for other people, too. In fact, it might be a useful exercise to try again from scratch and see what overlaps with your rejected review.

EmP - July 12, 2009 (04:53 PM)
Two of the three accepted reviews also had massive line break problems where the review was little more than a huge block of text. I fixed them in this instance, but it's something worth looking out for in future. 'spot has a different formating process than most sites (as in: it's rubbish and no one else wants to use it) so straight pasting over might have been the cause of such issues.

jsgx3 - July 13, 2009 (02:11 AM)
I was leaning toward the starting from scratch idea. I'll probably work on a few games I had not already written something on. Thanks for the info on where to recover my work, that's very useful and appreciated, and the other advice.

jsgx3 - July 13, 2009 (02:13 AM)
Good to know, If I had saved them to Word and made sure everything was saved and formatted correctly I could have avoided that. Apologies for the waste of time on your part, cart got ahead of the horse a bit there.

Feedback
	Felix_Arabia - July 12, 2009 (04:27 PM) The website saves every review submitted regardless of whether it is accepted or rejected. You just need to know the review ID number and you can retrieve any work you thought you lost. Just click on a review and change the link's number and you'll find it soon enough.
	aschultz - July 12, 2009 (04:30 PM) Maybe archive.org has the original reviews. If you don't remember the address, check your old contributor page at archive.org. Also, if you have a browser history, maybe you can check to see what the previewed review looks like. What Felix said. I don't know why I didn't think of that, but with his info I can figure one of your reviews must be here and for the others, you can try 8215, 8216, 8210 or 8209. (And on a related note, that explains why we're at review 8000+ but the random-read blurb only says 6000+.) It takes time to get a checklist of stuff you need in a review to be confident it's good enough. After a few times it'll seem natural enough. Things Zigfried mentioned like paragraph length, while it doesn't affect the information in your review, can affect if people are trying to read it. It may be worth leaving your review for a couple hours and coming back to it to see if anything big sticks out. One of the things I like to do is imagine if someone I hate wrote what I did. Would I be persuaded? Where can I poke holes? To me, it adds a little fun to proofreading. Proofreading should eventually be about ideas and not grammar. While it's tough to finger long sentences, I think OpenOffice has a free grammar checker, and Microsoft Word, if you have it, has something good enough. It's not exactly cutting work--it's freeing you up for the creative bits. A lot of what review writers do here is probably something we stopped being aware of a few years ago--it just seems natural to do it this way or that. But if you ask around you'll be able to learn, and by reading theirs, you'll probably osmose a lot, too. BTW, if you do decide to write the reviews from scratch, take heart that the most memorable stuff for you will probably be the most memorable for other people, too. In fact, it might be a useful exercise to try again from scratch and see what overlaps with your rejected review.
	EmP - July 12, 2009 (04:53 PM) Two of the three accepted reviews also had massive line break problems where the review was little more than a huge block of text. I fixed them in this instance, but it's something worth looking out for in future. 'spot has a different formating process than most sites (as in: it's rubbish and no one else wants to use it) so straight pasting over might have been the cause of such issues.
	jsgx3 - July 13, 2009 (02:11 AM) I was leaning toward the starting from scratch idea. I'll probably work on a few games I had not already written something on. Thanks for the info on where to recover my work, that's very useful and appreciated, and the other advice.
	jsgx3 - July 13, 2009 (02:13 AM) Good to know, If I had saved them to Word and made sure everything was saved and formatted correctly I could have avoided that. Apologies for the waste of time on your part, cart got ahead of the horse a bit there.

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