TVTropes Writing Contests - Discussion Thread

I have no idea how suitable it is for contests of this kind, especially since it's been a while since I actually uploaded anything there, but I do know that Pastebin generally does not mess with the formatting of whatever you upload. Might be exceptions to that as I've never tested it extensively and it rather is supposed to be for uploading code bits, but that's what I have.

The tentative deadline is close to passing, I have received three contest entries, and that means it's time to set the final deadline of the Contest.

Question to the contestants that didn't submit their entries yet: what state is your work in? How much time do you need to finish it?

Question to the judges: how soon can you begin the evaluation?

Being in the first group, I'll say that I'm about halfway done, need three days to finish, about two days to polish/proofread/edit it, and the final deadline of September 17th would be satisfactory.

Spiral out, keep going.

This is actually a perfect time for me to judge entries, so yes — a submission deadline any time between September 17th and September 30 would work for me.

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

It's fine for me

The Prodigal Son returns.

24 September seems like a good starting point.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

I'm pretty sure I'll have something readable by tomorrow, so no objections from me.

So, that leaves one person who didn't submit an entry and has been staying silent in the threads the whole time from the contest's beginning - IF Wanderer. No pms, no posts, nothing. Has anyone seen them around the fora lately? Are they active?

edited 11th Sep '17 2:11:55 AM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.

Well, they do seem to be active enough so I would presume that they simply aren't interested anymore.

Also, my entry sent, warning against toxicity included (should have been biohazard as that is what I promised, but I guess a writing contest entry isn't exactly organic so it wouldn't be proper).

edited 11th Sep '17 2:09:40 PM by Kazeto

This is strange... Is it possible to block all incoming pms? Perhaps the announcements I've been sending simply didn't reach them and they're not following the threads. Improbable, but possible.

Well, you have the time 'till the final deadline to dilute the toxicity a bit.

On that topic, I voted for Spt 17th, JHM for Spt 24th, Aw Sam Weston for anything between 17th and 30th, the rest don't mind...

I'm gonna go and call the final deadline September 24th, with a view to a late application, like SUNGOD's.

P.S. The judges: one of the contestants asked whether using British English will be penalized or not. It isn't mentioned in the old rules. Thoughts?

edited 12th Sep '17 12:09:47 PM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.

That's ... a good question, actually. I don't think it's really possible for that to happen unless the mods give someone a PM ban or however that would be called, but it is possible for someone to have blocked you at some point. I have no idea if you would be able to send a PM to them with them simply not seeing it or if it would give you a message, though, so it's just a wild guess. And it is also possible for someone to simply be sitting in a given sub-forum and have the page scrolled down enough to hide the message about P Ms and also not pay attention to the number indicating that you have unread messages, though why that would happen is beyond me.

The mods have answered several questions about the PM system.

So, that rules out accidents, IF Wanderer either blocked me or is ignoring the PMs. Unless they've been banned from the PM system and retained the rights to post, which is unbelievable, they're clearly uninterested in the Contest.

Spiral out, keep going.

Well if the rules don't specify what kind of English, then I see no problem with British English, American English, Australian English, South African English... Just so long as they're mutually intelligible.

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

Well, that's the real question here: whether the judges universally are able to recognize the use of British English (or some other form of English language) for what it is and not mistake, say, the British writing of "favorable"^note favourable for, well, a mistake on the contestant's part.

EDIT: If the judges are not able to do that, then here is a wikipedia article on the differences between the languages. Frankly, there are a lot of them, and you probably won't have the time to learn all the differences, but you can at least use this article as a reference sheet. On the other hand, there is only one contestant that I know of who used British English in their work, and they are willing to rewrite it if the judges decide to penalize the use of British English.

And that begs the question to the contestants: what kind of English did they use in their entries?

edited 21st Sep '17 1:30:32 AM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.

So I answered the question but then realized that it'd be somewhat breaking the anonymity if, for example, 2 people explicitly say they used British English and the rest used American.

edited 21st Sep '17 8:01:21 AM by Dealan

Whoops. Pm me, then.

Spiral out, keep going.

Well, fortunately you've managed to edit out the fact that you will be using Klingonian English for your work, so worry not, nobody will be able to pinpoint it.

As for the question you asked, Millership, I personally would act on the presumption that anyone who neither asked about the possibility nor wrote about the kind of English they will be using can be counted on to use either American or International English (which is close enough to the former not to really be an issue).

Fortunately none decided to write it in Old English, or at least I assume so, although the possibility of a quasi-Shakespearean contest entry is quite hilarious.

Damn.

*violently scratches out half of his work written in Old Norse*

Jokes aside, personally, it's the "operating on the assumption" part that I dislike. TV Tropes went far beyond the borders of the USA user-location-wise, after all.

Fortunately, right now there are not that many of us, so I started an anonymous poll via the PM system. Soon we'll find out.

The future contests will need a rule on the use of International English, at least in the main parts of the work, I think.

Spiral out, keep going.

Whilst I do agree that this kind of is an issue of some kind, and quite a serious issue in its own way too, I feel that at least some of it stems from what people who teach it as a foreign language are doing.

I mean, when I was a kid and English had been taught to us, we were pretty much forced to learn both British and American English alongside each other, as two variants of the same language; my cousin, however, who'd only been taught seven years after me, had only been taught American English with not even a mention that any other variant is a thing. Certainly, International English as a concept is at least somewhat rooted in American English, so it makes some sense to stick to that if you have to choose, but considering that I live in Europe I'm sure you can see why I consider this a fairly dangerous trend in its own way.

And TV Tropes itself is supposed to keep to one variant, which has at some point been decided to be American English, for the sake of consistency, and it is but one of the rules that are in place for the sake of consistency, so limiting the usage of other variants on the main page is something I can understand; on the forums and in anything that is done via the forums, however, yeah, I feel that anyone should be allowed to use any variant of the language that they prefer, for as long as it is not unnecessarily obtrusive.

Well, look at this in the context of the writing contests:

All participants, both judges and contestants alike, are from the same pool of people, to whom thoroughly applies the principle you just stated.

Theoretically all judges, without exception, should be able to evaluate the works on the same base level of competence. If one of the judges wasn't taught British English and the contestants use it in their entries, that will negatively affect their evaluation. It would simply be unfair.

So that means we have two options (at least, I see that much):

• Have a form of English language that will act as a Lowest Common Denominator, as the official language of the contests, which will in theory lower the number of potential contestants.
• Accept people as judges only if they are competent enough to recognize more than one form of English language, which will lower the number of the judges. And that also raises the question of Who Will Evaluate the Evaluators?

EDIT: Oh, and the option number three: to not judge by the conventions at all. Assume everything that is written is a direct speech.

edited 21st Sep '17 12:28:39 PM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.

Well, personally I see the fourth possibility: have each contestant write on top of their entry what variant of the English language they are using and then put the onuses where they both belong by having it be the judges' duty to make sure if something that is not normal for them is the writer's mistake or simply a different convention of the variant they are using (if you know what variant it is, and they will if every draft has that noted, it generally doesn't take that much time to confirm), and by having it be the writers' duty to make sure that anything that passes for slang that they use can be understood by their readers without going on search engine trips. That way it'll be easy enough: "color" is fine, "colour" is fine if marked as British English (and probably doesn't even need checking), "nagir" is fine if marked as Black Speech (though probably annoying as all heck for the judges and a complete flop in the readability department since, you know, it's not a variant of English), and so on, and so on.

And I will note that there are and/or were authors, some of them even highly regarded, who pretty much made their own author-specific variants of the English language by peppering their stories' dictionaries with neologisms of their own making, and then made sure that those can be understood by either having a dictionary available for the reader at-will (Herbert and his "Dune" series) or by having the characters provide translations for the words as if that would be a natural thing to do (Tolkien and ... bleeding everything he wrote), so not only is such an approach not without a precedent but it's also in a way proven that it works because is there anyone who doesn't live under a rock and isn't aware of those authors and their works?

edited 21st Sep '17 2:03:53 PM by Kazeto

I think it's reasonable to expect that a judge would understand language to a slightly higher degree than the writers who submit. So I'm inclined to go with Millership's second option.

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

That and Kazeto's suggestion are not mutually exclusive, though. And we probably should at least use the latter one for this contest, with time running out and all.

So:

• When I'll be forwarding the entries to the judges, I'll mark them with what kind of English is used.
• The contestants using British English (or some other form of the language) should mark the words (and idioms) that differ with asterisks (*).
• If the contestants are using neologisms and do not provide the meaning right away, they should mark them with tilde (~) and write the meaning in the appendix of the entry. Appendices should be included in the total word count.

How does that sound?

edited 22nd Sep '17 3:48:30 AM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.

I'm not really a fan of marking every different word in the texts. Personally, I'd rather trust the judges to know the differences, and worst comes to worst lose a couple of points. It's not a big deal.

edited 22nd Sep '17 4:43:21 AM by Dealan

Personally I'm with Daelan on that one. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm unique in that regard, but for me checking for differences between variants of whatever language via use of search engines has never been an arduous or time-consuming task, and if someone uses a word or a grammatical construct that is valid in one variant but obscure enough that the people reading it won't have any idea what to do with it then it fails in the intelligibility department anyway.

Likewise, while I do agree with the idea of explaining what a neologism included in the text means if that is in some way relevant and cannot be inferred from the text, I do believe that with the word limit what it is one would have to be on the brink of insanity to insert enough obscure neologisms into the text that the readers (i.e. judges) would not be able to simply look at the glossary at the beginning and go through the text without the need to go back and forth.

I don't know, maybe I am overestimating people, but to me when you see a weird word you know it to be a weird word even without it being marked, and if you need to mark your words with something so that the people reading it know to use the glossary instead of the word itself making them decide to do that (assuming that they do know that a glossary is there), it speaks more than anything else about you failing in some way as a writer.

Well, it seems that vast majority of the foreign users of TV Tropes have a native language from the Indo-European family, specifically Germanic and Romance languages, and the similarity between English and their mother tongues is enough to pick up "weird" words.

My mother tongue is of Turkic language family, and while I consider myself a fluent speaker of English, and can, in general, see the difference between American and British English, I don't trust myself enough to distinguish between a "weird" word and some obscure English word, simply due to lack of necessary background.

I'm not going to appeal for the role of a judge in the future for this reason and I'm the minority in this (like, real minority. I think I'm the only Kazakh troper. And I don't think that there's more than ten tropers whose mother tongue is not of Indo-European descent) so this is not my call to make. But people have to consider the possibility that there will be more of us in the future.

Spiral out, keep going.