Oops! Picture Story Challenge 2013

I'm averaging 5.93 so far. I see no point in not using the full range of marks. Even though a story I find weak and don't like has some good points, if I give it 4, say, I'm simply weakening the effect of my liking of another story which got 9. However, a while back, being discontented about the lack of any positive relationship between the stories I liked most and the top six in total votes, I decided if I really thought a story was poor, I'd give it 0 instead of the previous (rarely used) 1. So far I've had no wish to award a 0. For my taste, the overall standard this time seems to be higher through a levelling up.

Agreed. and people who say an author "deserves" a minimum of a 5 just for submitting a story are really diluting the effect of their voting. And you don't have to worry about hurting anyone's feelings - not only do participants not know the votes given my individual voters, they don't even know the total unless they're among the winners. I use the full range of votes, with the widest range being among better stories. I guess that makes me a REAL "tightwad" in handing out votes. It's just one voter's attempt to influence the results so that what I consider the better stories get recognized. If that doesn't end up happening, then so be it. The main purposes of the Challenges are to have fun and encourage writing. Viewed in the light of those ends, they have always been successful.

Not having participated in a Challenge before, I think the hardest thing about it was to get the scoring calibration right - in that I messed up totally, and would have scored a 1 out of 10.

I have thought about going through and counting all the different ways things got broken or dented, but way too much work on 72 stories.

I agree with many comments that the level of writing is very high and I express the hope that many new authors have given this Challenge a try, it is a lot of fun. Now I am sure I know who wrote at least one of the stories besides my own, but I will be darned if I can guess too many of the others...LOL.

As Njrick says, time to get back to the regular story listings, so enough of my slacking off reading, scoring and commenting on 70+ stories in a week. Sorry for slacking off on my job Njrick, I will now get back to my regular job of commenting on a story or two per day....LOL

CS

A cynic might say that the most important thing to do is give your story 10, and then think how many you're going to give 8 and under

I have finally finished reading all the entries and have to admit that I am pretty impressed with the quality this time: My average score is higher than on any previous challenge. Giving people four different pictures to write about, seems to have been an excellent idea — I have avoided the feeling of déjà vu that I have had on some previous occasions. Excellent job everybody!

I've just finished. My average score given is 5.9. I'm not sure if that's higher than before, but if not, I probably adjusted the standard to keep using a wide range of marks. There were very few stories I thought were mundane or poorly-written. The one minus is that it came at a time when I was unusually busy and preoccupied, so I'm not that impressed with my own entries. Mind you, judging by past results, that could mean I'll win! Not really.

I have 20 left to go folks and am fading fast. My average score is a 7.5 and I am not ashamed of it. I am generous with the eights, nines and tens if the stories are interesting amusing or hilarious. yeah, I'm easy!

You could easily check. You just need to select a previous challenge from the pull-down-menu in the challenge section and have a look.

So it's finally proved that I'm a mean old bastard — I only have an average of 5.4