Marks Out of Ten

From time to time, OEDILF members have discussed implementing grades for limericks, or nominating each others’ work for monthly awards for best (and worst) limerick. I’m not in favour of such approaches, which would make explicit a heirarchy that at the moment is just a subjective impression in each member’s mind, and different in every case. That would be a loss for the project as a whole: some people who discovered their work was unloved, or just less loved than they had hoped, would be discouraged, even if the reasons for that lack of love were only loosely connected to its quality. Web communities change when information like that becomes explicit.

Grading would divert attention from the quality-control mechanism we already have in place, the RFA. It would effectively be grade inflation: if everyone’s getting a bachelor’s degree, we’d better start asking for a master’s; if everyone’s getting RFAs, we’d better start grading the finished results. It would also be yet another chore to take up the time of editors, who already do a huge amount of reading and re-reading. (By September 2006, 14 comments and revisions had been made on average for every OEDILF limerick.) Even if a grading system was intended to give non-editor members some input, it would be unfair to exclude editors, and once the capacity is there our editors would feel compelled to make use of it. Much of what we do at the OEDILF that’s now expected was once optional.

With tens of thousands of limericks already approved, a new grading system couldn’t possibly be comprehensive enough. We would need at least 4 or 5 votes on each approved limerick, and preferably more, to average out differences of taste. They would need as many votes as they already have RFAs, and we’d need to be handing them out at the same time as all the new limericks coming in. It wouldn’t happen: a small percentage would attract a few five-star ratings from random individuals early on, then get more votes as everyone focuses on the top of the pile and agrees, while the vast majority would remain unrated and neglected.

Part of the reason the OEDILF works is that our critics are our fellow writers. It’s easier to accept criticism when it’s from someone whose work we can see and judge for ourselves. It makes our workshopping go more smoothly than it otherwise might. Having to please anonymous critics who may never have written a limerick themselves would be a major challenge to that workshopping atmosphere.

I mark postgraduate essays, and one of the occupational hazards is having to deal with the fallout when I give someone 55 instead of the 65 they expected, or 62 instead of 68, or 68 instead of 70. I have to explain how, in our marking scheme, each of those (in its own way) represents a good mark. I have no desire to experience that every time I check my OEDILF Activity List, just because someone’s idea of 3 out of 5 or 5 out of 10 doesn’t match my own.

But that doesn’t prevent me from being critical when necessary. A few weeks ago I was as critical as I’ve ever been of a new submission, and wrote hundreds of words of comments explaining why. It seemed as if the author and I would never find common ground, so I imagine we were both as surprised as each other when we eventually did; the piece now has my RFA. But giving it marks out of ten would have done that workshopping process no favours at any point. My giving terrible marks at the outset would have made it seem a hopeless case, and would have obscured my message about how it could be rescued. I would still have found it hard to mark it as if I loved it when I RFA’d, because it wasn’t a piece I was ever going to love, as the author surely knew by then. Yet I wanted him to take some satisfaction from my RFA, because it certainly wasn’t easily won. Forcing me to accompany it with a mark out of ten would have soured that.

Making marks anonymous doesn’t make the proposal any more attractive, really; it just gives people the option of avoiding the hard work of explaining why they don’t like a piece. Imagine some relatively new OEDILFer seeing that their tenth submission has an average mark of 3 out of 10 from seven readers, but with no actual comments. How are they going to feel about that? Enlightened about their awful writing? Encouraged to lift their game? Or hurt and discouraged to the point of giving up?

The Golden Raspberry Awards for terrible movies are given to the collective work of dozens or hundreds of people; it’s perfectly possible for anyone involved, even an actor singled out for specific attention, to shift the blame to circumstances created by those around them to spare themselves the psychological pain that such an award might otherwise bring. Not so possible when the five lines that got the gong are all your very own.

I’m not saying that we should never be critical, and shouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. If someone has been at the OEDILF a while then they can surely stick up for their work. But our new members aren’t directly comparable to the kinds of people who go to auditions, or submit novels to publishers, or make a Razzie-worthy movie. Someone who submits their first limerick to us has written a mere five lines of verse in a format they may never have used before. We can and do get people who have never written limericks before, and with any luck, and careful guidance, we get them to the point where they can write them competently. At that point it makes sense to start critiquing beyond the basics, but before that all you’re doing is compounding their sense that they’ll never get there, never be good enough—even if you know that they can be.

People who go to auditions will have done some music and drama at school, at least. People who write whole novels have written at least sixty thousand words, even if they haven’t been through the submissions process before. But people who write their first limerick have written 25 or 26 words, and that’s it. They often don’t have the experience, and we don’t have the evidence, to be able to say whether they’re really any good at it, or ever could be. Doing a Simon Cowell on their first efforts is not only likely to be counter-productive, it doesn’t even make sense. It’s as if we started unleashing the Academy on the first home movies of teenagers.

And before anyone says, “Okay, let’s just protect the non-editors from the ratings system,” or some other method of guaranteeing they don’t get discouraging Crappy Limerick awards before they’ve found their feet—how tempting does that make the prospect of becoming a Workshopping Editor? “Congratulations, you’re a WE! We couldn’t tell you before, but your work sucks.”

There’s nothing in the current system to prevent editors from going into a workshop with all guns blazing, apart from their wish to keep the peace. A rating system would encourage everyone to disturb the peace, whether they want to or not. I know that some will be thinking, “Yeah, we’d lose the crummy writers—so what?” But that’s wanting to have your cake and eat it. The OEDILF works because it welcomes everyone who wants to have a go; it’s not a Limerick Academy for the elite few. If it turns into that, it’ll be a small and lonely place.

Reworked from forum comments from September 2006 and June 2009.