Whew. That’s over.
If personal essays are a creative nonfictioneer’s meat and milk, it’s still important to know how to persuade your audience. That’s what Round Two tested. If you, like many of our writers, felt a little out of your depth, check out this tutorial we put together. It might help you make sense of your feedback (you did read your feedback, right?) and it’ll prepare you for the next Super Challenge.
That said, this round was a pleasure to read. Y’all love a good hate-read as much as I do, clearly, and you’re willing to pick bad advice apart to its bones. Persuasive essays are at their best when the writer genuinely cares about and is engaged with the subject, and boy were you engaged!
Once again, anything that went right is entirely due to our admin team’s untiring work behind the scenes, and anything you hate is probably my fault.
Before we announce who’ll be moving on, let’s take a moment to chat about the next round of the Super Challenge. Starting Friday, the advancing writers will be working with a sentence prompt. Each writer will incorporate that sentence into an essay about… well, about wherever that sentence takes them for inspiration. The essay could be personal or persuasive. The catch is that the sentence shouldn’t stick out or sound unnatural. Words should flow, nuance should be on-point, and our judges shouldn’t be able to tell where your writing ends and our prompt begins.
Sound fun? Let’s see who’ll be taking on that, er, super challenge:
Congratulations to Our Advancing Writers
Last round saw some thrills, chills and spills, but it also saw some great writing. Let’s have a hand for the following writers, who will be advancing to the next round of the Super Challenge:
Jennifer Chase
Sarah Grey
Laura Lucas
Laura Neill
Eleni Sakka
Margaret Shafer
Trish Tuthill
Paige Vest
Gail Webber
Krystina Whitten
Wait, wait, there’s more!
Writers, if you don’t have your feedback, please send us an email at superchallenge@yeahwrite.me, ’cause that email should have reached you about twelve hours ago.
Now that this round of the competition is over, you’re free to post your work anywhere on the Internet you like, or take our judges’ suggestions and rework your submission to send on to other venues. Or you can go ahead and link it up to our special grid right here:
Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
