Thoughts on judging for bulletin contests

I consider the current methods of bulletin judging to be negative and too narrowly focused. Negative because they focus on finding mistakes, and narrow because of the factors they fail to consider.

Judging criteria such as margin widths, are important articles in a prominent place, do headlines create interest, faulty parallelism, unvaried sentence length, incorrect hyphenation, whether there are lists of guests, and history (etc, etc.) tend to focus the judge's approach on bits and pieces. It is then easy to miss the total impact of the bulletin. This method does not take into account the author's purpose, the editor's purpose, or the chapter's needs (the audience).

Couple this with a point reduction system, and you have what I call a negative judging system.

While I agree we must use the conventions of standard written English, I also know good and interesting writing often violates the rules. I edit a bulletin that tries to preserve the writer's voice, including misuse of grammatical rules when they are part of the author's style. I don't want headlines that tell a story such as newspapers do, I don't publish Society news because the Society does that with its many publications, and I don't reprint material from other bulletins because I want original, homegrown stuff. Under the Society's rules, I'd be penalized. Yet I'm meeting the needs of my chapter with a good bulletin.

I would propose a holistic judging system that is positive. Holistic because the bulletin is rated as a whole; a sum of the parts. Positive because you start with its overall effect, then decide to what degree do typos, parallelism, and other misuses detract from the bulletin's impact. I guarantee you that any knowledgeable English teacher can read ten bulletins and holistically judge and separate them into three categories of high, middle and low. (Writing teachers and judges have used this process for 25 years or more. Its procedures are well documented.)

It involves the training of judges by reading a batch of bulletins and collectively agreeing through discussion which are highs (9-10), middles (5-6) and lows (1-2). These then become the examples by which the new batch of bulletins is judged. Any judgments disagreeing by two points must be resolved through dialogue.

I would suggest (for the sake of discussion) a rating scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high).

Each reader (judge) can rate the bulletin (without using specific checklists) by assigning a score between 1 and 10. It's intuitive. We know what strikes us as good and what is bad without looking at every word and comma with a magnifier.)

Considerations when justifying a bulletin's holistic rating. They are what you notice when looking at the big picture. These can be further defined if the judges don't know what they are: Overall appearance (visual); Originality/creativity; Layout; Writer's voice; Content (variety and types of articles); Conventions of standard written English (including mechanics and usage)

In reporting scores to the bulletin editor, I would insist the judges write a narrative telling what the editor did well in addition to suggestions for improvement. Don't be picky and use a red pencil. Be positive and supportive.