User blog:Booboofinger/Writers Workshop & You

I seems that every other day we get to see a forum post of someone asking why their story was deleted, and demanding an explanation as to why that happened. I'm sure the moderators get them even more frequently on their talk pages. That request is then followed up by a threat that if they don't get an explanation or, in some cases, their stories restored, that they will leave and go post in some other site. This before they break into a rant about how long it took for them to write it, how this site is unfair, how the mods are out to get them, etc., etc. I could almost feel sorry for these people. Sure, it's frustrating posting something only to see it deleted. And I'm sure that writing it took some time, no matter how questionable it's quality. But the reality is that if your story got deleted, there usually was a valid reason for it. Either it was a wall of text, had tons of spelling errors, got really creative with punctuation to name a few of the most common reasons. I could also be that your story, no matter what you think of it, just plain sucked raw eggs. It's frustrating to write something, correct it, revise it, revise it again, get feedback, revise it once more until it's a quality story and then post it, just to see it get pushed down by something so badly written as to bring about serious doubts about the quality of education the poster has had thus far. I imagine it's also terribly frustrating for the admins to have to sort through the avalanche of articles that are posted every day to sort out the garbage that careless people post. Now I'm not an administrator, nor do I consider myself superior to anyone who posts anything here. I have been known to misspell, put commas in the wrong places and even occasionally write something so bad, I actually feel guilty about it. But I think the main reason why so far none of my stories got deleted is because before I post them as an article, I always post them in the Writer's Workshop, as I think everyone should. There you will get critiques and advice from several dedicated users. They will let you know if your story has the pitfalls that would cause it to be deleted before it happens. So please, do everyone a favor and upload your stories there before posting it on the main wiki. I'm sure everyone here wants you to become a better writer. We would all gain by that. So it's really up to you if you want to become a good writer or if you just want to be some mediocre writer whose badly written story becomes the next Internet meme sensation through some quirk of fate.