Guide To Eratosphere - Page 2
As a guest, you can visit Eratosphere and view its contents. This is a good way to find out about the Forums and their standards before registering and posting.
To post on the Forums, you need to register as a Member. This involves agreeing to abide by the Site Terms Of Service.
As a new Member, you have to undergo a small apprenticeship before posting your own works for critique on the Metrical, Non-Metrical, and Fiction Forums: you must wait at least one week following your Membership approval and offer a minimum number of substantive critiques before starting a thread of your own. The minimum number of critiques for poetry is fifteen on the Metrical, Deep End, and Non-Metrical Forums combined. For the Fiction Forum, the minimum is three. Note, however, that the new-post privileges are no longer enabled automatically. Thus, as a new member, once you think you've achieved the required fifteen critiques, you'll need to contact the moderator of the forum where you intend to post to, and s/he will verify that you've indeed made fifteen substantive critiques, and if so, your new-post privileges will be enabled.
Once a thread is created, only a Moderator may move or delete it. Please send a Personal Message (“PM”) for help if you make a mistake (e.g. if you post to the wrong Forum).
You can edit your own posts. If you need a post deleted (e.g. a double post), please PM a Moderator.
For more information on how to use the Forum and its features, please refer to the Frequently Asked Questions (“FAQ”) section of this guide.
Please read the Forum descriptions and post to the correct Forum. The following points apply:
- The criteria for allocating poetry to Metrical and Non-Metrical are somewhat technical and are explained in the “Comments” in the Forums table above. If in doubt, please read and observe these criteria.
- Announcements and informational posts should go in the Conversation Forums, not the workshop Forums.
- Sometimes workshop discussions will expand beyond critique of a particular work into broader subjects. When that happens, you should terminate such discussion on the workshop thread and open a continuation thread on the appropriate Forum, usually General Talk.
- If in doubt, send a Personal Message to (or “PM”) a Moderator and ask for help.
- Moderators may move a misdirected thread to a more appropriate Forum.
You should post no more than one new thread per week in the Metrical, Deep End, and Non-Metrical Forums combined.
Unless a Moderator closes your thread, you are expected to leave it open for critique for at least two weeks after posting. Please do not post works which have been submitted for publication prior to posting, and please do not submit them for publication within that period. (Exceptions may be requested from the Moderators.)
Giving
Workshopping is a reciprocal activity. We don’t specify minima, but, on the poetry Forums, you should critique several other poems for each one of your own. Feel free to critique on any of the poetry Forums, not just the one on which you post your own work. On the Fiction Forum, you should critique more works than you post.
Critique should focus on the work posted and be as objective as possible.
Whether your opinion is positive or negative, it is good practice to support it by close reference to details of the text and, where appropriate, to suggest possible improvements or alternative lines of development. These features need not be present in every critique, but patterns of repeated praise or denigration without any support or suggestions are not acceptable.
Receiving
Please adopt a professional attitude in response to critique. A poster may disagree with critique, but that should be done tactfully. Disrespectful responses, e.g. those that include petulance or justify rejecting critique on the basis that an off-board authority knows better, are not acceptable.
It is good practice to respond to all critique. If you don’t feel it appropriate to bring the poem back to the top of the Forum, you can reply by PM.
Since the purpose of the workshops is to help Members improve their work, we expect and encourage revisions. However, you should take enough time to make sure you’ve done the best job you can before posting the new version. Avoid posting hasty or slap-dash revisions.
If the changes are very minor, you can edit the original and note what you’ve done. But it’s best to post a full revision if following edits would interfere with the reader’s concentration.
If the original thread is still on the Forum, post your revision in that thread by editing your original post and cutting and pasting the revision above it. Please label both the revision and the original version for comparison. To make sure the revision is noticed, add a new reply post to let members know it’s there. (The edit won’t, by itself, bring the thread back up to the top of the Forum.)
If time has passed and the original is no longer on the Forum, you must post the revision on a new thread. You may still wish to post the previous version for comparison.
Please keep copies of your work, including revisions, as you post it. You may also wish to keep copies of critique threads. This is important because we “prune” the workshop Forums regularly. Threads posted on them will “disappear” after a time.
Publication Eligibility
We prune threads so that works posted on them do not count as “previously published”. This would render them unacceptable to some publishers. Please note that some publishers may reject poems that have ever appeared on the internet, even temporarily in a workshop. To limit this concern, Eratosphere restricts search engine access to workshops (see the FAQ section for more details). However, you should weigh this risk before you post.
If you have any questions, send us a message anytime using the "Contact Us" link at the footer of every Eratosphere page. Alternatively, you can PM a Moderator.
