how do you judge anyways?
- Score shall be taken out of 50 points,
- 15 for Style
- 10 points for theme
- 10 points for pacing
- 10 points for creativity and originality
- 5 points for eloquence
Style is distinct to all writers. It's the consistency of how they write. Style isn't something you pick up automatically; it is what comes after years of writing and finding out what writing techniques the writer likes best. You can tell that a certain work is written by someone because of how it's written. Style is hard to catch from one piece of work, though. You'd need to know what else the writer has written because what you look for in Style is someone's writing habits. Not bad writing habits, though; good writing habits like being able to hold a certain amount of detail or how much the writer integrates themselves into the story.
I'm guessing that
Theme is easy points. Just make sure that the story has all elements of a Space Opera. At the same time, theme changes from story to story and usually only implied. You have to read the entire story to understand the theme, the message that the story has. Sometimes the theme is easy to find. Writers with a higher writing standard hide the theme to make sure that their readers are paying attention to what they are reading.
Pacing is how fast/slow the story moves through time. Consistency is best here, make sure that the story doesn't have ten pages dedicated to one moment, skip three days in-story, then do it again, skip five years, have 60 pages, skip a week, etc. A slow example is spending ten pages describing a vase. Yeah... These aren't the best examples of pacing, because you'd need to get fairly far into a story before saying that the story moves too fast or too slow. The writer does have the right withhold key information, is why.
Creativity and
Originality speaks for itself. It changes for every writer, so giving advice here is moot.
Eloquence shows the reader how the writer has mastered the English language. Vocabulary, connotations, grammar, conjugations, it's all here. The big one in my experience as a writer and editor-of-sorts is knowing your synonyms and make sure those synonyms are being used the way they should be used. Here's a good example: What's the difference between anger, hatred, agitated, rage, and ire? They're all related to anger, but the implications for each are slightly different; you can't just simply replace anger with any of the other four and say it works. Trust me, any writing instructor/teacher knows when this happens, because of how frequently it happens. They're not the same word. If they all had the exact same meaning as anger, there's no need for them.
Hatred - Anger with strong dislike, aversion, and/or hostility.
Agitated - Agitation can lead to anger, but you get things like this and it's easy to point out people aren't using a Thesaurus correctly. This is more like annoyed or disturbed. It can also mean excited, but these days we don't use it for that, anymore.
Rage - Anger and violence put together.
Ire - Very strong anger. Can also be wrath of the same degree.
