Home » Posts » 2005 » April

More Than Words
April 6, 2005 at 6:10 pm AST by Rodney MacLeod

Magic 93 has a Fantasy Wedding and Honeymoon contest. To enter the contest you were to send in an essay 200 words or less. A quick look at the entries for the contest show that the qualifications for the contest were not enforced. This probably happens all of the time in contests, but it does suck for the entrants who spent time and effort into writing a concise and purposeful essay that gets the message across in 200 words or less where others just ramble on for over 500 words and become a finalist. Maybe the person that wrote a 500+ word essay did write a great essay, and maybe the person they were writing on behalf of are deserving, but don’t you think that it is easy to explain there deservedness in more than 200 words.

Normally I would not care all that much about a radio contest, but it turns out that a friend of mine wrote a less than 200 words essay for her sister. Maybe my friend’s essay would not have made the top ten if the four or five other essays that did exceed 200 words were not in the top ten, but four or five other essayists, who kept their essay with in the confines of the rules, would have made it into the top ten.

My friend was upset and sent an email. This is part of the reply:

Since it was essay based, the judging was subjective; to minimize any
potential bias, we had a panel of judges narrow the entries down to approximately forty and then a second panel selected the ten finalists from that group. The contest was not needs based and since only a very few entrants used two hundred words, we made a decision early on to just read the story and not count words.

It was nice that they did reply to her email, but it does not change the fact that the rules were changed and they benefited those entrants who can not count that probably should not have been accepted.