I had the opportunity to be a judge for a writing contest in the earlier weekend and it was an interesting and enriching experience for me, so I thought I would share and document this little episode of mine as part of my weekend experiences.
In case you are wondering what the writing contest was about, it's actually a monthly writing contest over in the "Scholar And Scribe" Community. For those who are interested, you can take a look at these two posts.
- Contest Post
- Contest WInners
With the background out of the way, I wanted to share my thoughts and some of the deliberations that went on behind the scenes during the judging process with @thinkrdotexe and @grocko.
Pre-Discussion
There were 14 entries and we had to go through them and rank the best 5 on our own. The genre was horror and the thematic prompt was timepiece, and I thought most entries did a good job and I really enjoyed reading the submissions. So if you are one of those who submitted, I really appreciate you taking the time and effort to craft the stories.
That said, I felt some of the entries were not scary enough (at least for me) and some did not follow the thematic prompt, and I marked them down because of that. It was easy to get a top 6 or 7, but I had to re-read and re-assess to finalise on my best 5.
Ranking Process
After we had our individual preferences, we shared our best 5 entries. I wouldn't go into the specifics, but I would share that while the entries were largely similar, but the rankings within the top 5 were somewhat different. So we had a long discussion over how to rank the entries, justifying why one writer/entry deserved the place over the other.
Even though the discussions were very intense (I am sure the other two judges would agree with me!) because it was really difficult to rank writing submissions because such things were more of an art than science, the process was very cordial and we all had a chance to express our views and speak our mind freely. That was something that I really appreciated.
In the end, we settled on the top 5 and the respective positions. Hooray!
Final Thoughts
Well, I don't consider myself as an "expert" writer as I just went through the general education path like most English-speaking people. So to be judging writing submissions, that was something quite unthinkable, so a big thank you to @thinkrdotexe for the invitation and it was a very memorable experience and weekend for me.
Thanks for reading and hope you like my sharing! :)