About seven years ago, Sheila agreed to judge a personal essay contest for a writing magazine. Her task was to choose and rank the ten top essays among the submissions. Told to expect about 1,000 essays, she was surprised when 3,500 showed up at our door with only three weeks to choose the winners.

I knew that in order to do the job within the available time frame, Sheila would require help winnowing the number of essays down to a manageable size from which to select the winners. I suggested she and some trusted readers divide the pile of entries and do quick reads to sort out those that were obviously not contenders. I also shared a system for screening the entries I called a “demerit” system. Any essay that received three demerits on the first page was immediately disqualified. To help with the task, I lined up three skilled writers to help weed out the definite rejects. They would all come over to our house and we would make an evening of it.

I didn’t easily sell Sheila on this system. She has the uncanny ability to spot a diamond in the rough and help the author develop it. We had to remind her that for this contest, the writers would not get a revision opportunity after receiving her comments. She had to judge the entries as they were.

When the evening came for the winnowing, all five of us gathered with Sheila and read. At first, every time one of us placed an essay on the reject pile, Sheila asked, “Why are you rejecting that one?” and we would have to read the offending passages aloud to the group. I was touched by the way Sheila sympathized with the writing and knew what would work to better develop it, even if the rest of us took it at face value and were howling over it, but after more than an hour of reading the demerit-worthy aloud, I was glad when she decided to trust us to help find obvious rejects as long as we all promised to count only the very worst offenses as demerits.

I’ve since learned that most writing contests, such as the Associated Writing Program’s annual poetry contest, are organized with behind-the-scenes screening judges. In fact, in many of the contests, screening judges receive a portion of the entries and select only two or three contenders to pass on to the judge whose been announced at the decision maker.

If you are thinking of sending your work to contests, considering our demerit system will help you avoid having your work quickly thrown into the reject pile.

Demerit #1: The Unnecessary Preamble

 In the contest entries, an alarming number of writers used the preamble to present their credentials, telling the reader what good writers they were. Telling judges how many of your relatives and friends love your work or how your eighth-grade English teacher really thought you had potential will only lead the judges to giving you an immediate demerit.

Even if your preamble is not self-flattering, it still may be annoying to the screening judges.  We all flounder around in some way as we begin a piece of writing (tech related magazine and newspaper articles are my experience) and writing a preamble can help us figure out what we have to say. But when the piece is ready for someone else to read, that opening preamble usually isn’t necessary anymore and needs to be removed.

Demerit #2: The Line that Takes You Right Out of the Essay

That night, we read many essays with passages like this one:

This is a story about my grandmother who worked as a Rosie the Riveter during WWII. She was also a great cook, but that’s another story.

I think there might have been over 200 with a line like “but that’s another story” somewhere in them. Here’s the deal: If you are not going to use your grandmother’s fantastic cooking skills as part of the story you are writing, it’s just a distraction. Pointing out the distraction doesn’t make it less distracting. It leaves the reader wondering why you aren’t telling that other story. If a piece of information is important, use it. Otherwise, let it go for another piece of writing.

Demerit # 3: The Unsatisfying Metaphor

When a metaphor works, it communicates information exactly and efficiently. For the reader, a well-built metaphor is a nugget of pleasure. But a poorly built metaphor creates confusion and even irritation in the reader. When you look over your essay before submission, take a look at your metaphors to see if they have any of the following features:

A Partially Used Metaphor
If your metaphor only catches a corner of what you are describing and you use it only in passing, consider either taking it out altogether or making better use of it.

The Vice Principal suddenly rose like an orca, saying that if we couldn’t have a football team, he didn’t see why we needed an orchestra.

The use of the orca metaphor here may be, in the writer’s mind, a very apt description of what happened, but readers don’t have enough information to see the analogy and are left wondering how the vice-principal moved.

During the summer, we hammered out the details of the coming year’s budget in the school’s sweltering, airless conference room. Mr. Poretta, the Vice Principal who had once played professional football in the CFL, had been silent for most of the proceedings. Suddenly he rose from his chair, sweat flying from his neck like water off a breaching orca. “If we don’t need a football team, I don’t see why we need an orchestra,” he proclaimed.

With enough information, readers receive a fuller experience and better “get” the metaphor.

The Cliché
Another type of metaphor is the tired one, the one we hear so often it brings no freshness to a description and means nothing more than a simple adjective or adverb. For instance, “It’s raining buckets” doesn’t mean more to us than “It’s raining hard.”

It’s certainly OK, though, to quote a person using a cliché, especially if their use of the cliché reveals something about them:

While settling into his recliner for his evening ice cream sundae, Dad ended the argument by saying that he felt my brother had gotten his just desserts.

The Smothered Metaphor
A good metaphor carries information more concisely and succinctly than a non-metaphoric description. If you have a good metaphor, let it do the work for you rather than belabor it with an unnecessary prose envelope. For instance:

There was something about how those lawyers looked as they sat smiling in our company’s beautiful atrium lobby awaiting the decision. The self-satisfied look of pleasure they had on their faces reminded me of cats basking in the sun after a hardy meal.

Would be better rendered as:

The lawyers waited for the decision in our atrium like cats basking in the sun after a meal.

The Over-Extended or Telegraphed Metaphor
It’s enjoyable when a writer extends a metaphor to deepen the analogy to his subject and draw out new aspects of the parallel. However, each extension of a metaphor must bring something fresh to the description or you’ll test the reader’s patience.

When the chairman asked for our thoughts on the tree maintenance proposal, all of us suddenly transformed into children. The meeting turned ugly. Our voices now had a whiny quality to them and everyone spoke only of the complicated issues in terms of how they affected them personally. Everyone agreed that tree and hedge management were important issues as our community moved into its fifth decade, but no one could see any point of view but their own. In less than a half hour, the name-calling started and along with it came huffy posturing and vague, empty threats. Those who favored no regulations at all were called tree-huggers and hippies and those who wanted to adopt the eight-foot tree height limits were called “golf course Republicans” and “Californicators”. We all needed either an overdose of ice cream or a spanking; I wasn’t sure which. If we were still in school our teachers would certainly send us home with a note and we would have to spend our recess periods in detention. Our parents would be very cross with us, that’s for sure!

Somewhere in this passage, the image of spoiled, petulant children becomes tiresome. The metaphor ceases to inform the reader but continues on, far past its usefulness. The reader is forced to linger in the metaphor as the writer finds ways to continue to riff on the image. Fixing this situation requires taking something out. Perhaps without the “all of us suddenly transformed into children” early on, the ending use of metaphor would have more energy and freshness behind it.

I’d also consider taking out the exclamation point at the end of the passage. The writer is trying to use the exclamation point like the hypodermic needle it resembles to inject more meaning into the sentence than the text carries. Exclamation points are often mini-demerits. Any time you see one in your writing, regard it with suspicion. If you use one anywhere but in quoted speech, you probably have an important something that isn’t fully captured yet. I think exclamation points are often the writer’s signal to the reader to fill in the unexpressed thoughts on their own. That’s just lazy!

The Mixed Metaphor
Some qualities of a metaphor might be in opposition to others that you intend to invoke. For example:

As he talked to me, my anger welled until it became an ocean.

Here, the writer uses the ocean metaphor to signify the size of his anger, but the image of “ocean” may bring to the reader’s mind contradictory attributes such as “cold water”, “fun”, and “life-giving”, among others. In this passage, it would be better to choose a different metaphor or simply leave the metaphor out and rely on the word “welled”, which already has a mental picture built into it.

Demerit #4: Getting Your Facts Wrong

With the Internet, it’s pretty easy to fact check someone’s essay. For example, if you assert in your essay that there are no female soldiers’ names on the Vietnam War Memorial, I’m going to go check that out. OK, you get two demerits — there are eight female soldier’s names on the wall and the name of the memorial is the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial.

Demerit #5: A Clever Reference to Something Topical

Suppose that twenty years ago, I wrote something with the clever phrase “arms for vestiges” to capitalize on a big news story of the time, “arms for hostages”. That bit of cleverness would have no currency today and would be a distraction.

If your story is going to have any shelf life, you have to have a purpose for the clever reference to the issues and people of the day that goes beyond just a quip. The reference has to show something about time and place. For example, the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lends itself easily to parody today, and you may be tempted to make a humorous passing reference to it and incur a demerit from me. But I wouldn’t give you a demerit if put the reference to work for your essay’s occasion and speaker’s tone:

During the fall of 2003, while the Bush team was searching the hinterlands of Iraq for Weapons of Mass Destruction, I was turning my parents’ attic upside down searching for my old Elvis Presley records, a task that distracted me from the fact that my marriage was falling apart.

Demerit #6: The Snarky Aside

Breaking the fourth wall, as actors refer to it, is always a risky proposition. When you address your audience directly, the narrative flow of your writing comes to a halt, however momentarily, as you insert yourself into the presentation. An aside can only work when there is common ground and trust between the writer and the reader and the reader wants to know more about the way the writer thinks. If you haven’t already established trust with your reader, if you are narrow in your vision or injudicious with your humor, you risk losing the reader instantly with an ill-placed aside.

Let’s say that I was writing an article that contained some thoughts about the “what-not-to-do’s” of writing the personal essay or narrative and I issued this aside:

My point here is that you shouldn’t drag out all the unnecessary details (like women do to their husbands when they insist on describing all the minute details of their perfectly ordinary day).

You are very likely instantly insulted and alienated by this aside. If you are a woman, I have thrown you into an opposite camp from me. If you are a man and laugh at this aside, you aren’t really getting the lesson about details–details are there for the shaper in us to choose among and often as we write we have to see them all in order to choose). This aside is wrong, unhelpful and insulting, but there’s another reason this aside might alienate the reader–it contains an obviously over-reaching statement.

If you find that you have included an aside in your writing, ask yourself why you put it there in the first place. Does the aside’s credibility or tone or message differ from the larger piece in which it’s contained? If so, you should probably reconsider the aside.

The Nature of Demerits

For me, a primary source of pleasure in reading is making a mental link with the author. I feel connected to this person separated from me by time and distance. The writing is a vehicle of conveyance as our minds travel together through the subject matter.

When the writer incurs a demerit, it’s because I got bounced out of the vehicle. The vehicle has to come to a complete stop so that I can climb back in. Our minds are no longer linked. Instead, I am noticing the writer’s mind, commenting on it, judging it, deciding whether or not I want to climb back aboard. After a couple of jostlings, I have become an uncomfortable passenger who is now scanning the road ahead for bumps and potholes. If the jostlings continue, I will terminate my journey.

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Before there’s ever a piece to enter into a contest (or to publish), we as writers had to have started somewhere. “I’ll never forget the time that I helped judge 3500 personal essays” might lead to a demerit if I left it in my writing, but it’s a phrase I thought and wrote to begin this article. I’ll also never forget the apartment of one the graduate students who helped us — 6 filthy, expensive mountain bikes crammed into the foyer. But that’s another story, and perhaps one I’ll write some day.

Scanning your work for potential demerits is something that you should only do as you’re shaping and editing your work in revision. That’s when you must look for the phrases, passages, and metaphors that could bounce your reader out of the story. When you find one, look for a way to fix the writing — sometimes by using the delete key and sometimes by thinking of the “demerit zone” as a placeholder waiting for you to fill in better images and details.