The Helium rating system is a great opportunity for writers to see what works and what does not. Those who enjoy reading and rating are an enormous treasure to this community. Hats off to them. But there are many of us who consider it a bit of a chore. We've just completed writing an article and we may be anxious to get started on another, but we know that responsible rating is an important part of the process so we do it. With this in mind, let me share with you those things that will usually cause me to choose the other article!

1. When confronted with an article written without paragraph breaks, it is not likely that I'll read your article beyond the first 2 sentences. Your article will have to be enormously spellbinding to get me to read beyond that.

2. Likewise if you have written your article all in caps, my eyes will reject the format before my brain opens up to what you have written.

3. Rants and sarcastic ridicule are almost always completely inappropriate. If the other article has anything at all to offer I'll probably choose it.

4. Those whose writing is unrelated to the topic under which it appears will always be rejected.

5. Typos don't usually bother me immediately but they have a cumulative effect, along with spelling errors, and errors in grammar or punctuation. If it is clear to me that you have not proof read your own article, or simple do not have a command of the English language, then your article will clearly not be my choice.

6. Short, vague, or simplistic articles signal a lack of effort. I try not to reward articles which seem to be the result of minimal effort.

7. Articles that have be cut and pasted to the site without reformatting leave double spacing or irregular length lines which are difficult to read and unpleasant to look at. They are not likely to get a thumbs up from me.

8. When sentence structure or vocabulary make the article hard to understand, the other article will probably win. I try to skip titles that are totally out of my league, but I believe it's the writers task to make even difficult material understandable.

9.For the same reason, big words used in long strings do not impress. If a simple word will communicate without being repetitive or trite then use the simple and understandable word rather than wearing out the thesaurus at my expense.

10. Catch my attention. If you do that, I am happy. I'm not fond of slogging through articles that are just plain boring. Pick up the pace, paint the picture, peak my curiosity, or capture my imagination. When I'm bored, I'm gone.

With all that said, please know that I look carefully at the items that come before me in rating. I do not want to be unfair to anyone who is building skill and working hard to communicate well. I hope that every article at Helium gets the best and most open minded rating you can muster. My promise to all of you is that I'll always do my best to be fair in my comparison of the articles placed before me.

Learn more about this author, Susan Kliebenstein.
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