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Contests
I submitted some things to the school magazine-thing, in large part because there's a contest involved. Winning the prizes is a nice goal, but I'm primarily spurred by the knowledge there's ranking involved. As in, while practically everyone's submission may be published, mine can be acknowledged as superior.
This will not end well.
So now I'm keyed up by all this and I want to know who wins. NOW. I'd feel a lot more patient if it wasn't for the suspicions I have about how the decision will be made. There's no evidence this will be blind, so there's that bias, and while the people in charge seem reasonably competent, there's no way of knowing how they'll be judging the submissions themselves. There's also nothing stating that they aren't including their own entries in the contest and some suggestion they might be, and while I'm sure they wouldn't have authors allowed to vote for their own work, see point A about this not being blind.
Ironically, if they had a wider system of ranking, I'd be much less focused, but since only the top four entries get any recognition, I'm that much closer to having nothing officially saying I'm better than someone else. If they ranked every poem and story in the order they thought was best, I'd at least have a clear idea of where I stood and be certain my place would be somewhere highish, at which point I wouldn't care so much about if what beat me was really better than me.
I manage to be interestingly competitive, at least.
This will not end well.
So now I'm keyed up by all this and I want to know who wins. NOW. I'd feel a lot more patient if it wasn't for the suspicions I have about how the decision will be made. There's no evidence this will be blind, so there's that bias, and while the people in charge seem reasonably competent, there's no way of knowing how they'll be judging the submissions themselves. There's also nothing stating that they aren't including their own entries in the contest and some suggestion they might be, and while I'm sure they wouldn't have authors allowed to vote for their own work, see point A about this not being blind.
Ironically, if they had a wider system of ranking, I'd be much less focused, but since only the top four entries get any recognition, I'm that much closer to having nothing officially saying I'm better than someone else. If they ranked every poem and story in the order they thought was best, I'd at least have a clear idea of where I stood and be certain my place would be somewhere highish, at which point I wouldn't care so much about if what beat me was really better than me.
I manage to be interestingly competitive, at least.
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Granted, I am a complete stranger, as are most of your other readers. But I figured there would be no harm asking.
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