What You Can Expect of Us

1. I will give you as much technological assistance as WordPress allows. Namely, you will be able to use our comment search engine, edit comments and add HTML code to comments.

2. I will provide professional assistance as appropriate. For example, if your grammar is not quite at a professional level yet, we might create a list of tricky areas that you should watch out for.

3. I will write you a letter of recommendation, based on what I have seen of your work.

4. I will be patient, particularly given that this is probably the first time that you’ve ever had a job like this. Hell, this is the first time that I’ve ever had a job like this. When I started this website, it was frighteningly incompetent and amateurish.  As time progressed, we got smoother and learned more about what worked and what didn’t.

What We Expect of You

1. The most important thing is that you are consistently welcoming and respectful. Please be especially accommodating of newcomers that aren’t that used to how we do things here.

2. Please be graceful and tactful, particularly with regards to status and rank. Too many websites have fallen apart because the moderators and administrators are full of themselves.

2. Please be careful. Paying attention is obviously a crucial skill for a proofreader. (Did you notice that this item is incorrectly numbered?) Also, careful people tend to learn from their mistakes.

4. We’d like five hours per week of your time.

5. Have a fun time with this. That’s an order!

A Few Details About Our Business

For most of the past year, we received only around 15 comments a day. One full-time worker and one part-time worker could proofread and format everything. Over the last few months, our comment-traffic has grown tremendously. For example, this week we received about 125-150 comments a day.

125-150 comments is not very much work for a team of 2 editors and 3-6 volunteer moderators. So I expect that work will be fairly calm for the next month or so. But bear in mind that summer break in the US starts in two or three months. If students have more time, they will write more comments. Last year, the average visitor wrote nearly twice as many comments in August and July as he did in April or September. I project that we’ll see about a thousand comments on a typical August day. I’d rather train you while things are relatively calm than during the summer tsunami.

]]> http://www.superheronation.com/2009/03/13/volunteer-moderator-expectations/feed/ 1 http://www.superheronation.com/2009/01/14/an-overview-to-editing/ http://www.superheronation.com/2009/01/14/an-overview-to-editing/#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:35:05 +0000 J. Mallow http://www.superheronation.com/?p=2569 Our overriding goal is to provide a friendly and professional meeting place for aspiring authors.  Please keep that in mind!

Our Approach to Editing Comments

We want to set a professional example by editing for grammar, spelling, punctuation and capitalization. In rare cases, we may also make changes to style and organization. When you edit comments, the main question is which changes are necessary to help the typical reader.

Please do not change the substance or ideas. The only time this is acceptable is when the detail is totally and obviously irrelevant. (For example, what color is Jihad Joe’s hair? Who cares?)

It’s ok for comments to veer off-topic, as long as the tangents are related to superheroes or writing or writing careers. We can find or add a more appropriate article for them later. If the tangents would interest only a very small amount of people, please delete them after a week or two. (That will give the recipients a chance to read the messages). Otherwise, our comments will get clogged with year-old discussions that no one cares about anymore.

Editing Comments on Review Forum

The purpose of review forums is to encourage authorial autonomy. So the editing rules are slightly different. When an author posts on his forum, please do not edit his posts except as he specifically requests. If his grammar and spelling are atrocious, he will only improve if his readers tell him that he needs to get better. However, please edit other comments on review forums.

Our Approach to Criticism

When writers post their work on SN, we want them to receive friendly but honest criticism. Please fix any reviews that are too personal, nasty and/or insulting.

For example, “the characters could use revision” is fine. “Your characters tend to be flat” is fine. “Your characters need a lot of work” is fine.

“Your characters suck” and “you’re awful” are not acceptable and need to be softened. If a commenter is repeatedly nasty, please point out to him that most of our writers are really young and everyone tends to suck when they’re inexperienced. You can point him to more-refined authors, either on our site or elsewhere. If he’s still a problem, please let me know and I may ban him.

EXCEPTIONS TO THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH: If someone wants to self-publish, let the mobs run loose with him. He needs to know what people really think about his writing. Also, don’t worry about any criticism directed at B. Mac or Cadet Davis. They’ve heard worse. (However, if the criticism is unduly profane, please tone it down for the benefit of our guests).

What We’d Prefer to Avoid

Remember, we’re helping young adults learn how to write. People come to us for writing advice, particularly superhero-related writing advice. Accordingly, please be careful about comments that relate to politics, sex, psychological problems, and other touchy subjects. If any of these subjects would unsettle the typical reader, please place it in our moderation queue so that B.M. can look at it later. Also, please edit out heavy profanity on our posts. A lot of teachers use us as an academic resource, so we’d like to avoid anything that scares them away.

EXCEPTION TO THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH: If an author wants his review forum to be highly profane, mature or unusual, that’s fine. We will accept any kind of story that’s not rated R for sex. However, if a forum is very mature, let me know so that I can tag the forum for adult content and let readers know what they’re getting into.

1.  No R-rated sexual content.

Sexual content tends to scare away other authors even more readily than other mature elements.  Anything more graphic or creepy than a James Bond movie is probably not a great fit for this website– for one thing, about 40% of our readers are younger than 18 and many of the rest are teachers.

2. No gratuitous self-promotion.

I’d love to see your website, but contribute something first.  For example, if you’d like to link to your site, connect it in some way to what previous comments or the article itself.  If you’d like to market yourself without contributing something, please go somewhere else, okay?

3. Don’t give too much information.

In particular, please don’t ever post your phone number or address online, especially if you’re a minor.  It is not the best way to convince a professional to reach you.  Personally, when I see someone post a business proposal with a phone number in an open forum, I’m more likely to think “Good God, what’s he thinking?” than “Wow, he’s really making himself accessible!”

4. No fan-fiction.

Is your main goal as a writer to have a good time?  If so, serious reviews listing 25+ possible revisions for a chapter would probably be more emotionally overwhelming than fun.  If not, why are you writing fan-fiction?  (If your main goal is to develop your writing skills, I’d highly recommend building your own stories/premises/characters/settings from scratch rather than starting with a story somebody else has already written).  For fan-fiction reviews, I’d recommend fanfiction.net instead.  No, you probably won’t get many reviews more helpful than “this’s really good!!!” or “this sux!!!” , but I think that’d only be a problem if you wanted to become a professional author.

Thanks!