{"id":174,"date":"2007-09-16T21:40:30","date_gmt":"2007-09-17T04:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/2007\/09\/16\/evaluating-fiction-vs-evaluating-libation\/"},"modified":"2007-09-16T21:40:30","modified_gmt":"2007-09-17T04:40:30","slug":"evaluating-fiction-vs-evaluating-libation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/2007\/09\/evaluating-fiction-vs-evaluating-libation\/","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating fiction vs. evaluating libation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My Copious Free Time(tm) has been filled lately by two different evaluation projects. One is the <a href=\"http:\/\/writingshow.com\/?page_id=250\">2nd Annual Writing Show Best First Chapter of a Novel Contest<\/a>, for which the first round of judging is just winding up. The main benefit for contest entrants is that every submission gets a professional critique of at least 750 words. But additionally, each submisison gets a score on a 50-point scale, based on:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>10 points for Story. Is it a compelling read with a great hook? Are we engaged?<\/li>\n<li>10 points for Style. Is the writing smooth and tight, without awkward constructions, extraneous verbiage, and redundancies?<\/li>\n<li>10 points for Dialog. Is the dialog natural and does it move the story along?<\/li>\n<li>10 points for Character. Are the characters interesting? Do we care about them?<\/li>\n<li>10 points for Mechanics. Are grammar, spelling, and punctuation correct?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m also attending some classes aiming toward becoming a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bjcp.org\">Certified Beer Judge<\/a> (details on <a title=\"Meadblog\" href=\"http:\/\/blog.360.yahoo.com\/mdubinko\">Meadblog<\/a>). This isn&#8217;t as fun as it sounds. (Well, OK, maybe it is&#8230;). The idea is to build up better sensory perception so that my personal brewing and cooking projects can benefit. But the upcoming test is 70% written essay questions like &#8220;Identify three distinctly different top-fermenting beer styles with a starting gravity of 1.070 or higher, and describe the similarities and differences between the styles&#8221;. 30% of the test is based on actual tasting and filling out a tasting sheet. Of interest, the scoring here is also based on a 50-point scale:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>12 points for Aroma.<\/li>\n<li>3 points for Appearance.<\/li>\n<li>20 points for Taste.<\/li>\n<li>5 points for Mouthfeel.<\/li>\n<li>10 points for Overall Impression.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The interesting part is that there&#8217;s similarities between the two tasks. For both, I need to work off of physical paper, not in my head on on a computer screen. For both, I first &#8220;skim&#8221;, building an overall impression, then dig down into individual categories to assign a score for each one. Then I step back and look at my numbers, and check whether everything makes sense and accurately records my impressions. When I&#8217;m satisfied, I add everything up and am done.<\/p>\n<p>Most day-to-day problems aren&#8217;t so well structured or normalized, but nonetheless, I find myself tackling all kinds of problems with a similar approach. There you have it. Writing and drinking beer make you a better person. :) -m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Copious Free Time(tm) has been filled lately by two different evaluation projects. One is the 2nd Annual Writing Show Best First Chapter of a Novel Contest, for which the first round of judging is just winding up. The main benefit for contest entrants is that every submission gets a professional critique of at least&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[28,27,3,1,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everythingismiscellaneous","category-languages","category-patternalia","category-stuff","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8eo8l-2O","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}