[quote="Braveheart"]I wonder if Grammar & sentence structure (And other nitpicky small stuff) is a big criteria when people judge stuff, or maybe the general outline of the story is more than enough?[/quote]
Any story that has atrocious grammar and bad spelling will not get my vote no matter what the plot and characterization is like. If the story is unreadable, it's not going to get my vote, and I doubt the other serious writers will say anything different.
I myself take writing very seriously, and while this contest is for fun, I have seen entries that were nothing but misspelled words, run on sentences, and lack of capitalization or punctuation; in other words, literary nightmares. Anything that's full of consistent and rather blatant errors and atrocities, quite honestly, I won't even finish reading it. You can't have a good piece of literature if you don't even
try to use the amount of grammar a third grader knows. You don't have to be an expert at the language; I know some people aren't native speakers after all, but if you submit a huge mess that isn't formatted like a story at all and you clearly didn't try, I'm not going to take the entry seriously.
As long as you
try, and it follows basic grammar, some mistakes here and there are acceptable and expected, even. I notice mistakes in my own work that make me cringe, so of course I won't condemn anyone who actually tried to make their story readable. It's just that if you don't try to utilize grammar and spell correctly, it won't be readable, and so I won't read it.
If it looks anything like this, it won't get my vote:
[quote]
Simba jumped up and ran over to pumba. hello pumbas can we go to investigate that noise i herd it was loud. no sed pumba, thats dangerous. so instead, Simba went to get nala. They journeyed into the woods together cos their best friends and they found the noise was caused by a two legged animal withotu hair on it and simba looked at nala and said what is that thing and why is it in are jungle and nala sed i don't no simba, but its got to be friendly and so they walked over and introdooced themself as the king and queen of the pride lands and the creeture told them it was a human and its name waz dave and they all went to dave's tent and he read them the stories he was righting and they loved the stories and they told him so and everyone was sooper happy[/quote]
I'm not exaggerating when I say I've seen "stories" written like that, and such things are simply abominations. If your story looks remotely story like, then the plot, if strong enough, can outweigh any grammatical or spelling errors... as long as it looks like you took it seriously, unlike the mess above.
[quote="Shawry111"]How would one right? Who do we send it to etc? I might just have a go at it... How many people usually enter by the way?
[/quote]
You
write in either Microsoft Word, Notepad, etc., or you write directly into the "compose PM" box. You send the story in a PM to DGF when it's completed.
Most of the time, myself and DG are the only ones who enter these days...