Question and comment about APSE changes

[spankys]

First, the question. The past few years we've sent in library printouts, saving so much time and energy from turning our office into an arts and crafts store. This year, it says printouts are still accepted, but must now be pasted onto 8.5 by 11 paper? Is this right, and if so, what's the point of that?

Also, this year, each writing catergory has to be mailed to a separate "catcher"? So we mail out like 10 envelopes rather than 1?

 

[MileHigh]

Guessing everything can be answered here:

http://apsportseditors.org/contests/

There are e-mail addresses that you can send questions to.

 

[SF_Express]

I expressed my belief that pasting one printout that pretty much fit onto an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper onto another 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper was silly, but was told that for now, that's what the rules say, so I dropped it. These guys have enough to worry about with me being an asshole about it.

I noted that all of the excising of things that needed to be done could be done by taking a story and pasting it into Word and then deleting the things you don't want. It was expressed to me that this would make cheating more possible. I noted that there were a number of ways to cheat (including updating live web stories with fixes or new information to make them look better, even though prohibited by the rules) and that nobody would ever know, and that there had to be some reliance on members' honor in these things.

They listened thoughtfully and said they'd talk about it for next year, but for now, cutting and pasting is still part of the deal. So I'm collecting my clips and getting the glue pot ready.

I will note, finally: Last year, I did exactly what I said in the second paragraph above, turned in very clean, pristine printouts with no paste, much easier to copy, much easier to deal with, and nobody said a word. But they made it clear that it shouldn't be done that way this year.

So OK.

 

[Versatile]

I expressed my belief that pasting one printout that pretty much fit onto an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper onto another 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper was silly, but was told that for now, that's what the rules say, so I dropped it. These guys have enough to worry about with me being an asshole about it.

I noted that all of the excising of things that needed to be done could be done by taking a story and pasting it into Word and then deleting the things you don't want. It was expressed to me that this would make cheating more possible. I noted that there were a number of ways to cheat (including updating live web stories with fixes or new information to make them look better, even though prohibited by the rules) and that nobody would ever know, and that there had to be some reliance on members' honor in these things.

They listened thoughtfully and said they'd talk about it for next year, but for now, cutting and pasting is still part of the deal. So I'm collecting my clips and getting the glue pot ready.

I will note, finally: Last year, I did exactly what I said in the second paragraph above, turned in very clean, pristine printouts with no paste, much easier to copy, much easier to deal with, and nobody said a word. But they made it clear that it shouldn't be done that way this year.

So OK.

That's cheating? I call that copy editing. I do that every day, multiple times a day.

 

[SF_Express]

Yeah, it's not so much fixes and updates in the middle of the normal news cycle. It's going back three months and fixing things that you find when you're pulling entries for the contest. Or, more sinister, updating or whatever.

I actually understand that prohibition, but again, it's an honor deal. If you fix it, nobody's going to know ... but you shouldn't do it.