Tactical PMs

Burraku_Pansa:
Tactical, the application reviewer team regrets to inform you that we can't see fit to accept you into the group, at least right now. We've found your mechanics score to be about average, but other areas of your exam were a tad lackluster or offensive.

On the mechanics portion, you scored a 19 out of a possible maximum of 33, the average being somewhere in the area of 16–18. We've passed people who've scored worse than that, when their other areas adequately made up for it, but that's not the case here.

With your short answer responses, you often spent more time explaining why you "disagreed" with a concept or telling us what the concept isn't than you did actually explaining the concept—more than once, what you supplied as a sort of substitution for the concept was actually just the concept itself (or a facet of it). This made us feel as though you weren't fully grasping what you were covering.

With the review, as you yourself seemed to think, it wasn't particularly helpful. At times, I might even label your manner excessively rude, even to the point of directly insulting the author at least once. While there were points where you said some genuinely helpful things, the entry taken as a whole just isn't what we're looking for from our reviewers.

And overall, it must be said that there were times the application reviewer team felt that you were baiting a rejection. If that's the case, I can only hope that you're baiting us in a benign, "I'm happy they would turn something like that down" sort of way, rather than a spiteful, "they'd really turn me down?" sort of way… Apologies if you weren't actually baiting us. Things like
[quote]I came up with an awesome example that’s both very clear and very awesome.[/quote]
and
[quote]If you need help with the word "irony" just let me know.[/quote]
certainly made us squirm, though.

The application reviewer team would like to let you know that you are free to reapply at any time, but if being a part of WRITE is something you want for yourself, we encourage you to give the next attempt your all.



TacticalRainboom:
Thanks for your response. Mainly, I question what was wrong with my short answers. I can see how my answer to Mary Sues wasn't very good, but I think my SDT discussion was pretty solid. And I failed to actually identify The Hero’s Journey because I was giving an honest analysis rather than an obtuse argument; I think I demonstrated that I understood the idea.

I fully expected to get a failing grade on the end review, because I quickly decided to give up on editing like I had something to prove--instead, I reviewed exactly as if someone had handed me that fic expecting help. Hence "ooc notes."

I'll be honest: I think I demonstrated plenty of aptitude, and I should have passed except for my arrogance in short-sightedly acting like I was too good for this test. And in the fact that I didn't have the patience for the end review.

I should emphasize that I have plenty of faith in your screening. My adversarial tone was probably a result of me trying to prove myself in a different way, and I didn't realize until after the fact that it was, yeah, inappropriate.

This has been informative and kinda fun. Maybe my failure will inform those who didn't know how to feel about your process, especially if they end up agreeing with the decision to fail me. Again, thanks.

I'm not sure if I would want to be part of your group anyhow. I like you guys, but I don't like obligation.

I really gotta stand by my statements regarding Mary Sues and LUS, though. Maybe we could open a discussion about that?



Burraku_Pansa:
[quote]I can see how my answer to Mary Sues wasn't very good, but I think my SDT discussion was pretty solid.[/quote]
The SDT answer didn't actually let us know much. You talked a lot about how giving examples can be meaningless, and is a poor substitute for a concise statement like "Describe this in a sensory way", but in doing so your explanation fell fairly flat. Partially because you then go on to provide an example, but in an very uninformative way—you gave the "tell" example, but for the "show" example, you only said
[quote]You know how this should have been written.[/quote]
Of course we know how it should have been written, and of course [i]you[/i] know how it should have been written, but just saying that says nothing. Almost every bit of your answer for that question made you come off as weirdly arrogant.

[quote]I really gotta stand by my statements regarding Mary Sues and LUS, though. Maybe we could open a discussion about that?[/quote]
The big issue with your answers for each of those questions was that you [i]only[/i] really talked about why it's bad to adhere to the concepts. And it's perfectly fine to disagree with the concepts—if memory serves, a fair amount of the people in our group do, and made that clear in their applications. But that needs to be in addition to demonstrating that you've got a full understanding of the concepts in the first place. Your assertion that it's bad to use terms like "Mary Sue" as a crutch is very correct, but that doesn't mean using the term at all is inherently bad. A reviewer can and probably should make an author aware that a term like "LUS" exists, then go on to explain it and how to avoid it. Your responses seemed to assume that we want reviewers to use those terms and leave it at that, when the opposite is true—we want to make sure that our reviewers are capable of explaining the concepts they're using.

And also, your response for LUS was flawed in that LUS is, by definition, the [i]excessive[/i] use of epithets. It is indeed a bad things when people start advising the total eschewment their use, and part of what we like to see in a response to that question is understanding and explanation to the effect that discouraging LUS is not, in and of itself, discouraging any and all use of epithets.