It's time to revolutionise.

Hey everyone,

I've been watching YWS, YWO and TW for a while now and, although I found this layout the most efficient, I'm not hugely impressed with your critiquing standard. In the poetry section especially, the majority of comments on pieces of work go something along the lines of:

"This is awesome!!! Totally love it! PM me when you have more!!"

... And I would say that is distinctly unhelpful to the writer. How can they be expected to grow and improve when all you're doing is giving them compliments?

So the main reason I'm here is not to improve my own work, but to improve the general standard of critiquing and reviewing. In my humble opinion, your standard of critiques are just as important as your standard in writing, because being able to spot the flaws in another person's writing improves your ability to spot them in your own writing.

You're probably reading this and thinking, "arrogant cow" but really, I'm just letting you know what role I want to fulfill on the site. If you'll let me. //rant

Now that's over, a quick introduction:

Hello, I'm 16 and I'm from England I like modern languages and English. I'm a grammar nazi and proud XD I generally write prose, although since I'm doing NaPoWriMo I've been leaning towards the poetry side of affairs. Can't wait to meet you all and hopefully revolutionise the critting standard in a joint effort.

Haha, you're among good company! I remember I did the same when I joined when I was your age. And it was awesome. And somehow, people loved me and feared my critiques simultaneously... it was pretty epic! Anyway, glad to see people carrying on the tradition!

By the way, cows are over-rated. Pigs are where it's at.

Sixteen? English? Likes modern languages and English? GRAMMAR NAZI?

Hellooooo. Looks like we're going to get on fine.

Hi, I'm Stella, I'm sixteen, I'm Irish, I'm rather excitable, I'm a little too picky about grammar, but I don't like poetry. Well, not that I don't like poetry, more poetry doesn't like me. I don't know. We've discussed it. We're on speaking terms now.

Anyway, as for the reviews, in general a lot of the "OMG I loved this" ones come from new members, mostly we like constructive reviews (but again, we may seem softer than TW and YWO and we probably are, because we believe in encouragement. If you just tell somebody "This is worthless, go burn it" -not that that's what they do on the other sites, but, y'know, example, then they're hardly not going to write anymore? But that said, the others have their merits too and I'm happy you've decided to come to YWS. And now I am going to leave this parenthesis. Goodbye.) so I'm happy that you're going to come and be constructive with us.

A little getting to know you, firstly, are you a boy or a girl or an undecided? Who's your favourite author (authors, really, can't expect you to pick one)? Favourite type of cheese? What type of prose do you write when you're not writing poetry?

And how's NaPo going? Me, I'm doing Screnzy and I'm thinking that it's deceptively easy...

Oh, and I almost forgot...

Welcome to YWS!

If you need anything, give me a shout, I'd be super happy to oblige!

-Stella x

Hey, whatever constructive criticism you want to bring to YWS, be our guest. We're working on improving critiquing standards-- the [url=http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/forum338.html]Nomination Threads[/i] are where you can nominate people for badges, and two badges are for exceptional reviewers. Yay for incentive!

Best of luck at NaPo! I'm more of a prose girl myself, although I am occasionally assaulted by an idea for a poem.

Hope you find that you enjoy the site. ^^

Thanks all for your welcomes, I'll make the effort to be a little nicer in my critiques here than I have been in the past (:

Stella Thomas: Pleasure to be of your acquaintance! I was going to do Screnzy, but then thought it would take too much time -- how easy, scale of 1 to 10, are you finding it? In answer to your questions: female, James Frey/Mark Haddon, brie, realistic fiction (to me, that means anything OTHER than fantasy. I'll review it happily but when it comes to writing about swords and dragons I'd much rather stay in bed) ... Yourself? Also, just so I get a faint idea, what percentage of the site are Twilight-lovers?

Constructive criticism = yay! You're very welcome to be here, Standard. Like Stella mentioned, those one liners of encouragement tend to come from newer members who aren't as critique savvy as some of the older ones. But we have been working on that, and its nice to have another person around for the cause!

Welcome again.

-Lauren-

Haha. I have to say, I like fantasy, but nothing to do with elves and dwarves and all that. I mean, if you're going to make up a new world, at least make it an original one? That said, my favourite things to write are fairytale retellings, so I'm a complete hypocrite. I don't like "high" fantasy as such. But realistic is awesome too.

My Screnzy is a play, not a screen play, and I'm forty five pages in. On a scale of one to ten, nine and a half. I mean, it's awful, but it's easy to write, and it's only a draft. But that's because I'm a dialogue lover and I like the theatre, as much as I love movies, I feel like a screenplay would be much harder.

What percentage are Twilight lovers? Um... hard to say, maybe about 20%- can you put a percentage on that kind of thing? Most of the more active members fall into the other category, and if you're really a hater (I'm not, I don't like the books themselves, but I think Meyer gets a hard time, she wrote books, they were popular, why should she get all the abuse she gets?) we even have a Twilight Disposal usergroup.

And... yeah.