Earning rating stars on Helium is one of the single easiest tasks to accomplish here. I never noticed I had a four or five (depending on the week) stars for ratings until someone else pointed it out. When questioned how I managed such a feat, I replied as honestly as I know how. I've earned so many stars for rating articles by rating articles! Simple as that, period.

For those concerned about their rating stars, there are two tips you need to remember.

1. Helium is not a second-to-second site, so just because you barely finished rating 500 articles in one sitting doesn't mean your stars will shoot to five right away. It can take a few hours or even a day before any change will occur.

2. Stars are based on a 90-day period. So if you rated tons of articles last November, by now it will be off the rating record and you could see those stars slide back to zero. The best way to avoid this problem is to consistently rate a handful of articles each day.

Easy as can be. Now the actual activity of rating articles might make some people feel overwhelmed or intimidated. I know when I first started it seemed like a massive task to accomplish. Since then I have come up with ways to make my rating more efficient.

Though many people will disagree with me, I do not always read every article I rate. Before anyone pulls out the tar and feathers, let me explain. When I receive two articles, one with paragraphs and proper punctuation, and one with a giant slab of text without white space,....I do not bother to read them. I automatically rate the block of text the lowest.

There is a reason for this, it doesn't matter how good the block text is, without proper paragraphs and white space, nobody anywhere will read it anyway!

White space, or the space between paragraphs, is essential to both on-line and print writing. I find that by sticking to this rule, I avoid wasting time reading useless articles. The same goes for anything written all in caps or without punctuation. I just steer clear of the frustration and wasted effort by immediately dropping those pieces down, and hoping that the author will notice that everything with high ratings also has proper framework and white space.

Some people feel that I am too harsh in this, and that raters should flag and comment to the author about the problem. I applaud this and think it's a great idea. But I also know that if I stopped to flag and comment on every piece that had these problems, I would never have enough time for my own writing.

Whatever way you choose to do it, quality rating creates high quality content for the site, and my particular method keeps me rating articles without getting testy and fed up. I truly think the white space/punctuation rule is my number one rating secret.

Learn more about this author, Aysha Schurman.
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