Help Me Get an A

[ertyu]

Posting in an epic thread.

Voted for you OP but Benjamin Gowar is like 400 votes ahead of you somehow

Fuck Elphaba.

That is all.

[Shuemue]

Ceph is correct, this is the thread that just keeps on giving.

[Jefe]

Voted~

[Lebzile]

I voted for OP because, well, he asked.

Afk cutting myself.

[Chicomagiko]

Voted.

[Shojin]

Looks like Benjamin is a bigger forum whore

[travOtaku]

If you saw his picture, you'd understand.

[Shuemue]

someone knock up a voting bot?

[aers]

Benjamin Gowar | Facebook

Is it this person?

[Shuemue]

I might change my vote if it is, dude has hot friends.

[travOtaku]

With a moustache that grand, I'd be surprised if he didn't.

[Shuemue]

Do you know Lauren Graves too?
Can you get nudes?
We'll vote a shitload more for nudes.

[Kazen]

Rationale: A vote for the OP is a vote against Elphaba.

^ Voted for the OP.

[Hyriu]

^ Too bad the other guy found another forum or something. lol.

[Akucaen]

Queen bitch strikes again.

Also, voted for you OP.

[Ivve]

i've taken a look through elphaba's livejournal. and this is a person who should under no uncertain terms be making literary criticisms of any kind, whether she was attempting facetiousness when she wrote that particular piece or not. i say this not in defense of the op's writing, nor solely as an attack on elphaba's, but out of concern for the notion that she might actually do something as misguidedly self-righteous as contact his professor. i think that for your opinion of your own talents to be so falsely high that you feel the need to attempt to potentially jeopardize an individual's paid post-secondary education with complaints to his professors you must, as your own writing also suggests, live a somewhat empty life. it is really a more immoral thing to do than to post on a website asking for people to vote on your work in a contest. which his prof, as others have already mentioned, probably acknowledges anyway, and which will obviously be what determines the results regardless.

i have been published in several arts and literary magazines, quarterlies and journals, and i think that the op's sentence is the best one.

I completely agree with this, and with some of the posters that have mentioned that there are number innovative writers out there who took liberties with grammar and vocabulary that paid off. I think it's actually pretty common to be less by-the-letter in first-person narratives, especially in more contemporary work. Two authors who come to mind immediately when I think of this are Joyce Carol Oates and Chuck Palahniuk. They've both used their run-on sentences, fragments, and other errors to convey personality traits about their main characters, rather than description alone. Given, it does require a certain degree of consistency to be effective, but the fact is that there's nothing wrong with using your grammar as an instrument to illustrate something other than your own personal grasp of modifiers and prepositional phrases.

Creative writing is not an umbrella under which only the pedantic may stand. While all I'm sure all of the pieces in this contest could use more revising, a creative writing class is not about writing the perfect piece of literature. It's about learning how to best communicate your ideas in a way that allows your readers to connect and stay engaged. That is not something you can teach in any way but trial and error, really. Even full-on, professional, published writers take advantage of workshops and similar functions to help them rewrite and prune their ideas as necessary.

Certain people would also do well to remember that this is someone else's story, told in someone else's voice. Not everyone would choose the same words or sentence structure to convey their idea. I personally didn't mind him just using "red" to illustrate the blood -- I know what blood is and I don't need it spelled out for me. Would it have been the creative choice I made? No; I felt it was a little simple for the setting, but neither did I feel that "red blood" was a valid suggestion. (Didn't anyone teach you to avoid cliches, Elphaba?)

[Shuemue]

Only bad writers need rules to govern creativity.

[Ramor]

this isn't about writing, this is about how popular you are on the internet, and we as /bg/ have a rightful duty to assist this man in his quest to prove that he, and by extension us, are fucking awesome.

edit: or rather 'is' since i supposing it doesn't match the antecedent, since i know one of you grammar nazis will point that out

also OP has same first name as me so i even more approve.

if i could set up an automatic voter much in the same way people have for moot on time100's poll, i'd do it in a heartbeat; unfortunately i have no idea how, so best of luck to you OP.

[Tyche]

That Gower kid has destroyed the poll. THis is unacceptable. We need to find someway to garner a sympathy vote from 4chan.

[Jefe]

The other dude has way more votes now, and that means "elphaba" has won.