ATTENTION: FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH WORK-SITE SAFETY REGULATIONS MAY CAUSE UNSAFE ENVIRONMENTS AND INJURY. THE UNITED STATES ARMY HAS FULL AUTHORITY TO DISCHARGE ANY SOLDIER FOUND IN VIOLATION.
1. This competition involves 12 competitors navigating through 7 tasks until only 1 stands. Depending on interest levels, additional competitors may be allowed to enter. Each participant may only enter as one character. A prompt for each task will be given to you, and your job is to write an entry which satisfies the task requirements. There will be ten days for you to write and turn in an entry for each task. After that will be a Period of Participation, where you will be expected to read and comment on every entry and vote for who you would like to advance in the competition. You will have four days to accomplish this and at least two days to place your votes. This gives me two days to complete thorough grading and deliberate on who will be up for elimination.
2. Turn in on time. No exceptions except when there are exceptions. Exceptions are given for emergencies in which I can't deny them without feeling like a terrible person. They are not for unexpected family game nights. I am happy to take as many requests for extensions as you wish to send my way, but do not expect much. Read Rule 1 and make sure that sounds doable before you sign up. If you fail to turn in on time, then you fail your other competitors. You will be eliminated from the competition, banned from any other future competitions I have authority to ban you from, and have a rather angry host on your hands. If your entry is late, it's not turned in.
3. Period of Participation. These will occur after each task and last at least 2 days. During this, you are required to place votes for who should continue to the next round if applicable, and also to write a comment on every entry other than your own (see rule 4). Wattpad has a really dope annotation system built into it and I want to make use of that while also encouraging participation within the community of this competition - hopefully leading to both more votes, and more informed votes. A big part of old competitions was the community's power to decide results more so than a less representative judge or group of judges. A failure to leave comments before the deadline will result in a 5 point deduction to your score for the next task. A failure to cast votes will have the same consequence. Failure to do both will deduct 10 points from your next score.
4. Commenting. To comment on an entry you can either highlight a specific passage of text if you are on the Wattpad mobile app and then write your message, or, on desktop, you can hover the cursor over a paragraph then click on the gray speech bubble which appears to comment. If you have trouble leaving annotations, you can leave one or more comments at the bottom of the chapter where you write the name of the competitor, then your message for them in a list (see below). You may be asking what should I write in these comments? Well, it's up to you. I can suggest just highlighting an element of the entry which you enjoyed, or maybe you want to make a joke based on the text, or the classic 'this is me'. Whatever tickles your fancy. If you want to write the letter e on the first sentence of each entry, I'm not going to dock you any points, you'll just have to live with the shame. The number one thing is to have fun with it!
(Example of un-annotated comment)
Contestant 1: The description in your first paragraph set the scene beautifully.
Contestant 2: Your last line killed me!
Contestant 3: I like turtles.
etc.
5. Voting. After each task, a number of competitors will be placed up for votes. You will be told on a per-task basis how many you can choose to vote for to be sent into the next round. Vote for the competitors you think deserve to continue deep into the competition, by sending me a private message on Wattpad with their names. If you are up for votes, you MUST vote for yourself. I do this to boost voter turnout and motivation. I want you to want to win. This will actually reduce bias through the acceptance of it to a degree. Other than that, try to be as unbiased as possible in your decisions.
6. Grading. I will grade your entries out of 50 following a proprietary rubric taking into account many facets of writing and how well your entry accomplishes the task provided. These scores will be used to rank all of the competitors, and the bottom (however many will be up for votes) will be put up for votes for that round. Scores will mostly be a tool for me to organize my judging, so I will keep them private. I will however keep record of all the scores so after the games are finished I will be able to produce them for any legitimate inquiries should they arise.
7. Submission. To submit an entry send it as an email to [email protected]. You can additionally utilize the Google Docs tool and share a document to the same email with the "can comment" permissions. Please include the name of your character and the task number in the title of any submissions (also include your username if you are submitting your character form). If you submit through Google Docs, I will provide annotated notes to every task as well as an overall summary of my thoughts at the end. If you do not wish to bother with Google Docs you can of course only send in an email and I will still provide traditional paragraph-form notes for each task. Notes will be shared with you in private before the start of the next task. Both methods are time-stamped and they must be submitted before the posted deadline to be accepted.
8. Questions. If you have any questions feel free to ask either through comments on this book, or through my private messages. I'm actually really lonely and always happy to help.
SAMPLE WEEKLY SCHEDULE
Thursday: Task prompt is posted, time to start writing.
Next Sunday: Task submissions are due. Entries will be posted publicly as soon as possible. You can start leaving comments on entries to fulfill your period of participation requirements.
Tuesday: A voting chapter is posted less than 48 hours after task submissions are due. You can now place your votes and fully accomplish your period of participation requirements.
Thursday: Voting closes and the next task prompt is posted.
