I spent a good part of last night judging entries in a poetry and story writing competition organised by my writing group. It was a depressing affair. A few of the poems were very good but mostly they seemed to be first drafts by people who had little or no idea of structure, rhyme or metre. Some of them had a spark but almost all of them looked as if they had been written in a single draft with no attempt at fixing the problems.
The more depressing part though was the story judging. None of them were particularly good and a couple were so bad that I couldn't even give them a mark.
I know it's the English teacher in me but it would have been nice to see at least a basic grasp of grammar and punctuation. One of the stories had a block of unpunctuated text almost half a page long. It wasn't a stylistic device it was just a very long and poorly constructed run on sentence. The worst one, though, had every "its" and every plural and a lot of other words that coincidentally end in "s" written with an apostrophe, randomly placed either before or after the "s". I tried to ignore it and focus on the sory itself only to find that it was incoherent gibberish.

The moral of this is that English teachers should not allow themselves to be persuaded to judge writing competitions.

(On the other hand things did look up in the pub later at the quiz. We didn't win but I was mightily impressed that the music round wasn't about the usual pop music selection, it was about classical music. Very intellectual.)

When I worked in a computer lab in a local high school once about 2 decades ago, I was dismayed to see that writing for a largish percent of the classes which came thru the lab was a matter of locking the shift key in place and not using punctuation , except the odd period (full stop) thrown in a random ... I happen to believe you cannot teach somebody to be a great writer, but you can teach folks how to spell (or use a dictionary), punctuation conventions and other style and usage guidelines, and how to structure their prose 9or poetry). The most important skill, and perhaps the last learned, is how to edit and rewrite. The most depressing thing about most groups getting together and reading each other something they've written is really not so much the poor quality of their texts, but the abysmally wretched quality of their criticism. It tends to be binary: fantastic or sucks ...

One of the reasons that I am only an occasional ad-hoc member of my writing group nowadays is that the criticism tended to be unary. It was so relentless uncritical that it was effectively worthless.

As indeed were some of the pieces I was judging last night.

This is the perfect place for this post; I had been planning to start a new discussion.

I spent all last night reading and grading abstracts for an international conference on quality and safety. While I understand that the writers are from all over, still, it's a prestigious conference and I was stunned at some of the submissions. Here is one example:

quote:

Hemophilia is the special care needed chronic diseases also have high level of cost of treatment. These are one of important healthcare problems in Thailand and these are inducing mental problems to social and communities as well.

And so on...

When all was said and done, I halfway understood what they were doing, but this is to be a scholarly piece of work!