Good on you for making a teachable moment. I am sure you will have a life-long impact on that writer’s work. I remember a couple comments from a judging sheet of a national speech contest I entered in high school that have forever improved my public speaking. I had started my speech by having to adjust the mike stand (too high) and made some lame, chatty comments about it as I was doing it. A judge pointed out that the first words out of my mouth should have been the strong opening of my speech – I distracted everyone from the impact of my words by my fumbled opening. During the speech, I alluded to a struggle I went though, and much of my speech was based on overcoming that struggle, but I never named the issue! A judge wrote that talking openly about the struggle would have made my speech much more powerful.

All that to say, you never know how your constructive criticism will improve someone’s skills. In high school, I never imagined wanting to do much public speaking. Now I speak in front of large groups regularly as the Education Coordinator for Rhode Island Right to Life.

But, anyway, you are so right…everyone has a different opinion. This is just preparing all of us unpublished authors for those editor responses – when we get to that point (hopefully soon).

Now I just need to get my thank you notes written. THANK YOU (and all of the other judges) for taking time out of your life to volunteer. You are MUCH appreciated!

My 70′s scores seem pretty decent. Quick glance at judges’ comments seems to show quite a bit of disparity on what was good and what wasn’t, but I’m sure they will converge to some degree once I read the feedback in detail.

I applaud you for that “teaching moment”. The person who scored in the 30s out of 100 needs your criticism more than the person with a 90. I’d wager their desire to write well is equal. Maybe not right away, but eventually, that person will be grateful. I know I would.

And the reason why I spent four hours on the lowest-scoring entry is because I saw it as a teaching “moment”—as in, I couldn’t score this person a 1 or 2 (out of 5) on each element without giving a really good explanation of why I’d done it and how to correct it either in revisions or in the future. I sent back at least five pages of notes (much of it from series I’ve done here on the blog) on the score sheet, in addition to the comments I made throughout the manuscript.

And why spend more time on the lowest scoring manuscript than the highest scoring manuscript? Because there isn’t as much to say/comment upon. One of the hallmarks of a manuscript that’s going to garner a higher score from me is that it doesn’t take me very long to read, and once I finish my first read-through, there aren’t many things I’ve edited or commented upon—because the pages kept my interest for the full time I was reading it.

It’s the same thing with reading published books. The ones we love, that we get pulled right into, that end up going on our “favorites” shelves, are the ones we read straight through in one or two sittings, ignoring everything else going on around us as much as possible. The ones that don’t pull us in, that don’t interest us as much, that have errors or problems in them that are obvious to us, are going to take us a lot longer to read simply because we don’t want to do it for a very long period of time.