Beolakh
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|  | The Rubric (cue Beethoven's Fifth)
« Thread Started on May 21, 2007, 11:47pm » | |
......drumroll...
The Rubric
The Rubric gives a work a score out of 100 points: 20 points for Mechanics, 40 points for Design, and 40 points for Technique. Here's the breakdown:
Mechanics:
Spelling. (5 pts)
'Nuf said. Spell things correctly. There's a spellchecker built into the forum, for crying out loud. Type your posts up in a word processor, check them, and copy-paste into a forum post. Easy 5.
Grammar. (10 pts)
Your standard punctuation (and having it in the right place) will give you an easy 5. The remaining 5 pertain to things like subject-verb agreement, definite antecedents, dangling modifiers (technically lack thereof, I guess), unbroken parallel structures, etc.
Syntax. (5 pts)
This is a small cross-over between Technique and Mechanics. Does the mechanical layout of your sentences complement or contradict the pacing of your piece? Do you have long segments of descriptive narration full of short, choppy thoughts, or action-packed fight scenes full of long, flowing sentences? This is one of those things that, when done well, can help bump you to that Tier III level.
Design:
Plot. (15 pts)
How well was the Plot laid out? Did you incorporate enough twists, enough surprises, enough downfalls into the events of your story to keep it interesting? How original was your plot? Did it avoid overused cliches, stagnant passages, sporadic coincidence? How well did you design the layout of events in your tale?
Character. (15 pts)
Major element here: Change. Did your character change during the course of the story, or did the story occur...just for the sake of occuring? Without causing some kind of change in your character, the story has no purpose. Also, this category pertains to character development. How much thought have you put into your character? How believable is he or she? Is enough said that the audience can relate to the character while still be kept guessing? Does your character have motive to be involved in the story? Is it continuous with his or her personality and circumstance?
Setting. (10 pts)
There will be a lot of cross-over between Imagery and this section. How unique is your setting? If the setting is per requisite mundane or common, did you find ways to keep it interesting? More importantly, did you find ways to incorporate it into the plot? A setting is much more than a backdrop--it is a stage. The plot occurs not over the setting, but in it. Make sure the setting plays a part in the plot; otherwise, it's dead weight.
Technique:
Dialogue. (5 pts)
Where applicable. If you managed to create a piece without dialogue, these points will be incorporated elsewhere. How effective was your dialogue? Did it flow well? Was it believable and true to your characters? Was it well timed (did you avoid long monologues in the middle of heated fight scenes)? Did you avoid overuse of dialogue tags and redundancy?
Imagery. (10 pts)
How skillfully did you portray each scene? How vivid were the images you evoked? Crosses over with Setting and Diction. Lack of description, or shallow descriptions, will hurt this score.
Diction. (10 pts)
Did your word choice enhance or detract from the storyline? Did you often lapse into redundancy? Was your piece full of superfluous "dead weight" wording, or did you condense as much as possible, to make every word count? This section also includes voice--did you make a concerted effort to maintain active voice, or, if you reverted to passive voice, did you have a definite, legitimate reason to do so?
Rhetorical Strategy. (10 pts)
By far the widest-reaching category. This pertains to any advanced rhetorical strategies: symbolism, metaphor, irony, foreshadow, synecdoche, anaphora, and all such manner of long English-class words. Did you use any? Did you use them well, to enhance your story? This category will cross over with basically all the others, since good use of rhetorical strategies will enhance the other aspects of your work.
Wild Card. (5+5 pts)
Small subjective buffer. A place for the judges to incorporate some bonus points for the overall quality of the piece. The "+5" means that, while it only accounts for 5 of the total 100 points, judges can give up to 5 points extra credit here.
Scoring
Just to soothe the qualms of you over-achieving folks used to scoring 90+% in school: Rubric scores are NOT like letter grades. In a letter grade system a 75 is "average," but that is not going to be the case here. The way this system works, anything over an 80 is a great thread. 90+ threads are probably going to be unheard of, since you'd have to manage perfect scores in several categories.
Point values factor in both Rubric scoring and length. This isn't to say that longer pieces are better; just that a five-page thread written with the same level quality as one with only 10 posts should get some more moolah, right?
So then, the formula for points is this:
SCORE x WORD COUNT / 800 = POINTS
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"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." ~Jean-Paul Sartre
Beolakh Caethesryr |
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