Inventive Law Office names...bravo!

Jools:

On the last challenge, which required a letter form, some entries were basically stories with Dear X at the start and a name at the end. In some cases there was no obvious reason why person A should have chosen to write to person B about this experience. I marked those low because it seemed to me the essence of the challenge was the letter format.

On this one, the challenge is defined by the picture. So a story that could easily have been written without any reference to a will (or something that looks like a will) seems to me to be not entirely honest in its response to the challenge. Many writers are very clever in the ways that they use the pictures and I think this is part of the fascination of the challenge. So if someone treats the picture as virtually irrelevant, even if their story is very enjoyable and well-written, they wouldn't get a 9 or a 10 from me. Of course, a clever idea revolving around a will shouldn't get a high mark if the story is poorly written and doesn't interest the reader.

Fortunately I think nearly everyone did treat the picture as central to the challenge.

oops and double oops

Absolutely! I made sure I referred to the boat AND the ducks.

To a great extent, everyone who scores a story makes his or her own rules, because the weighting of the score you give is totally up to you. It's a very subjective way of doing things, but I hope it never changes. It puts the burden directly on the author to write the story that has the greatest appeal to the greatest number of readers.

Guy

I agree. I was going to post a comment about this, listing some of my favorite names from the stories, after the challenge was over. But naughtypet beat me to it. I haven't run across the firm of "Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe" yet, but I still have a few more stories to go.


did I commit a faux pas? Or are you just pointing out my redundancy, or maybe it is my redundancy? I'm not sure what you meant. I could be missing your point - that kind of thing happens to me a lot.

No, I think Miss Naughty (who is incredibly modest) was joking that her own entry had neither quality - but I'm sure she's wrong.

What I was meaning is that I don't believe describing the will as a scrolled document, tied with a fuchsia coloured ribbon was vital to the plot, so long as the plot involved some sort of inheritance and of course a spanking. Fortunately ALL of the stories mentioned that something had been bequeathed to someone in a Will, but not many of them described the visual attributes of the picture itself in full, or correct detail. And to me that isn't important in determining a good story which fits the theme.

There was a lawyer named Robert Cheetham

I don't remember reading about him - maybe he is in one of the stories I haven't yet read. I look forward to meeting him!

"Sue, Grabbit and Run" is a popular lawyers' name to describe the ambulance chasers