Welcome to our yeah write #134 weekly challenge grid popular voting
Because we have BlogHer’s NaBloPoMo going on at the same time as our regular challenge grid, we’ve had many new visitors stop by and take a look at the rest of our happenings on the site. Thanks to those who took the plunge and submitted a piece to the challenge grid with a special thanks to the writers whose submissions we didn’t accept.
Hey, meet me at Camera 3: It’s never a direct commentary on your writing style or a judgement of how good you are. If your personal essay or blog anecdote has a central conflict, rise and fall in the action moving the story forward, told with a beginning, middle and end, it’s a yeah write submission. If it’s missing one or more of those elements, we will likely return it with suggestions on how to strengthen your story for next time.
If you’re a pretty strong writer and you think some other writers on the challenge grid are far weaker, you could be right. In our community, we have beginning writers, emerging writers and the more advanced. We judge each selection individually based on technical and artistic merit. Each editor is somewhat involved in the moderation process, and there sure are times we wish an entry was more exciting, but as long as it meets the basic submission guidelines, we’ll allow it to stay. Editor picks (when there are 30 or more on the grid) and the final results of the popular vote will usually settle the debate of whether or not it was a reader’s choice.
It’s not a perfect system and it can be, admittedly, erratically subjective, but it has served to push our writers toward writing for their online audiences with clarity and purpose without purple prose and wordy manipulation (word salads are the first to be pulled off the grid). Nearly everyone who’s had a submission returned has come back another day with a stronger, more focused, better organized narrative.
It’s Day 7 of BlogHer’s NaBloPoMo at yeah write
Which means the 105 bloggers on the NaBloPoMo challenge grid should have seven days’ worth of posts up for you to read. Please stop by and discover some new-to-you blogs and say hello. The first yeah write perk package for NaBloPoMo will be randomly drawn and published in a winners’ post on Friday. The winner must be a yeah write subscriber and have not missed a day of writing from Nov. 1 to Nov. 7 by midnight their local time. Good times. Exciting days ahead.
Challenge grid voting
The challenge grid crowd favorite and top row five winners will be determined by popular vote.
Everybody gets five votes
Click on the thumbnail to read the post before voting. Click on the voting icon to vote for the post after reading. Do not vote for your own post, please. (Some of you guys are trying to kill me)
Read the posts before voting
We are responsible voters here at yeah write. Read, evaluate, vote on merit. We’re still writing the yeah write way, and we want the votes to reflect it.
Voting is open until Thursday, 10:00 p.m. EDT
- If it’s after 10:00 p.m. EDT [-4 GMT] on Thursday when you’re trying to vote, voting is closed. There will be no more voting icons on the thumbnail and voting will not work.
- Once you’ve voted for your five favorite posts, you’re done voting. The voting icons will disappear.
- Voting for your own post should be disabled. If it’s not, please don’t vote for your own post.
- Once you’ve voted for the five best on the grid, you are then free to campaign for votes for your favorite entries.
- If you’d like to see the current vote tallies after you’ve voted, refresh the page.
- If you ask your people to vote for your entry, please let them know they have five votes, and they should vote for yours only if it’s one of those five best on the grid. Campaigning for your own targeted votes is highly discouraged.
- Yeah write and the Inlinkz app allow only one round of five votes per IP address. When campaigning for votes for your favorites, please ask outside voters to read this section before voting. It will lessen their confusion and curb their clicking enthusiasm.
- Don’t make Erica M’s kids have cold cereal for dinner because she’s ignoring them while tracking people driving from hot spot to hot spot to vote nine different times. So uncool, no matter how much her kids like cold cereal.
Winners’ post published Friday by noon EDT
Once the voting ends, the challenge grid will sort itself from highest number of votes to the fewest. Ties are broken by number of page views. Until the winners’ post is published, none of the sorting will be official, but you can still get a good idea of where everyone ended up until the votes are validated.
Refreshing the page, watching the votes go up or down?
When the votes go down, that’s Erica M eliminating targeted or duplicate votes from enthusiastic BFFs and people accidentally voting for their own posts. The vote tallies show only from the same IP address you voted from the first time, so if you leave home and get to the gym and, oops, now can’t see who’s in the lead, please wait until you get back home. Your voting again to reveal the new tallies just makes much more work for Erica M who, in exasperation, may delete first and ask no questions later. One voting round per IP address, one voting round per person. Thanks.
Yeah write #134 voting is open…
well, you told me. 🙂
We should give away your fudge this week! You ready? I can wait until the next drawing.
whatever you say – just tell me when, and i’ll whip up a batch!
Thank you for fixing. I will do penance. I still don’t know if I entered again or not. I may have entered several times. I’m not sure. I only didn’t sign up twice because the computer stopped me. I’m so hopelessly befuddled. Maybe it’s the disease germs eating my brain.
have i not had enough coffee here, but didn’t i read a great essay from michigan left? is the grid messing with me?
Kathleen’s entry, though wonderful, wasn’t a personal essay or a traditional blog anecdote, so I had to pull it while moderating the grid. It’s great to have her back!
got it. so what would an essay like hers be categorized as?
Open letters like hers can work as essays as long as the principal trait of the personal essay is present: some sort of change or transformation in the narrator (self) by the end of the piece. If I write a letter to my mom detailing how much I love her and I loved her at the beginning, I’m still loving her in the middle, then when the letter ends, I’m loving some more, what happened? What was the action moving the letter forward for my readers? Sometimes, we get entries that I call beautiful lists of facts. Well-written, but simply a list of this happening then that happening then this happened then we went home loving each other even more. Sounds pretty, but it’s without storytelling elements. Since yeah write isn’t a writing workshop, we’re not set up to teach people how to craft these elements within their pieces, but we can encourage them to research, read and practice on their own time, returning with an entry more aligned with the guidelines.
If you send the children, make sure they bring sleeping bags. Must love dogs.
I didn’t intend to vote for me. I just wanted to see how fast the connection worked and now I can’t undo it. I hang my head in shame. I mis-clicked. Please don’t die. I didn’t mean it.
Thanks for letting me know! In fairness to others, I’ll remove it 🙂