JosephB

Fun, fun, fun!

Thanks to all judges, and congrats Loulou, eggo, Foxee, and adrianhayter. Can't wait for the next one!

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Chris Miller

That's a tricky one. I thought Wafti was right at first. But 'lain' is a conjugation of the verb 'to lie' not 'to lay' - And since something is being acted on (and not just lying there) the verb is 'to lay.' Whew.

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Barcelona Review story: http://www.barcelonareview.com/64/e_cm.html

Wafti

Oh right, cool. Thanks for that. Hmm... I wonder how many other errors I have made and not realised because they sound ok.

Sam Winchester

Okay, but I didn't infer that from the story. I'm sorry if you don't understand this, but the score I gave was based on my own personal opinion. It was not influenced by others'. I truly didn't enjoy the story. I thought the end was rather good, if that's any consolation. The passage to that point was just confusing.

Sam.

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A Vaulter's Insanity

Woohoo! overall worst score! Now THATS an accomplishment.

haha. Not that I didnt expect it. I wrote in literally two minutes and i dont think I edited or anything. I was kind of in a hurry and didnt really care. Maybe next contest ill actaully try.

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eggo

Thanks judges!

Humor can be, as Chris said, a complete set of groaners or funny. I'm glad I was able to write a few that you all could like.

Great prompt.

Congrats to Lou, Foxee and adrian for winning. There was some really good ideas here and not just the same old tired theme again and again.

So great job for every entrant for putting some thought behind their stories.

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LolliAdverbs

Congratulations to the winners! And thanks to the judges. The entries were so varied, it must have been very difficult.

But now I have a grammar question -_-;;. "If" requires the past conditionnel form of a verb, which in the case of "was" is "were" right? But is "as if it was heaven" really the correct form?

Grammar is important to me (not as important as story though ), so I just want to clear this up. But if it doesn't, it doesn't. I'm not complaining. I'm just happy such contests exist so we can all practice our writing and understand how to better it.

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Sam Winchester

Depends on the context of the rest of the sentence. I can't tell from just that. It's also a matter of tense. Depending on the tense of the sentence, you can usually tell which is correct. Post all of the sentence.

Sam.

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Sam Winchester

I think this is the line you're referring to? Heaven in this context is singular, therefore the word needed is "was".

Think of it this way: you can't say "the people was camped outside," can you? Because people is plural, therefore "were" is needed to make sense of the sentence. In the same way with heaven, because it is singular, you need "was".

Hope this helps.

Sam.

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LolliAdverbs

You know what! This is embarassing!

"The world below was chaos, and high above God was watching it like it was a Super Bowl between the 1967 Greenbay Packers and the 1993 Dallas Cowboys."

That's the sentence I wrote. Turns out I was asking a question about nothing at all. I thought I had used the conditional. Sorry to even take up the slightest bit of time with that.

Anyway, thanks!

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Non Serviam

This is the subjunctive, not the conditional. "I was in heaven", but "If I were in heaven" is technically correct, even though "I" is singular. The "were" can indicate the subjunctive rather than the plural, see?

But it's not fictionally correct, which is where Hawke's coming from. You see, there are some phrases where technically correct grammar rings false.

-- I phoned my girlfriend. "Hi, Jenny, it's I. How are you?"

Does that jar when you read it? It's technically correct.

-- I phoned my girlfriend. "Hi, Jenny, it's me. How are you?"

That's technically wrong (because it uses "me" for the subject of the sentence--should be "I"). But fictionally correct. Do you see?

The same principle applies to the subjunctive--and to "whom" (which is the dative form of "who"). It might be technically correct but, if you have an informal narrative style, it's fictionally wrong. Nowadays we tend to use more colloquial phrasing, which means eschewing the subjunctive, whom, and so on.

You CAN use subjunctives and whom in your writing, but only if the rest of the piece is quite formal in tone, which this piece wasn't.

Make sense?

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LolliAdverbs

Perfect sense.

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Non Serviam

No, it was a legitimate question. You could have written:

High above, God watched as if it were a Superbowl blah blah blah

... and that would have been technically correct.

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Sam Winchester

What's the rule on "whom," Serv?

I hardly use it at all. I thought it was something to do with the objective case in a sentence, and so therefore should be used in object position in a sentence.

Someone else told me that if the word "whomsoever" works in the sentence, then "whom" is okay to use.

Not too sure on either of those.

Sam.

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Non Serviam

Shakespeare gets whom wrong, as does the King James Bible. It's really complex. Really really complex. It goes right back to the roots of our language.

Modern English has basically three cases (nominative, objective, possessive) but whom doesn't really belong to any of them. Middle English used to have four or five cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative-- and a vestigial vocative case transplanted from Greek, which only really survives in the word "O". You still see the vocative in romantic poetry from time to time... "O Wordsworth, thou king among poets," style of thing).

Whom is another vestige of that time--so it's the grammatical equivalent of male nipples. Something with no remaining purpose that's still there.

It's the dative form of "who".

In theory "dative" means the indirect object of a sentence (where "accusative" means the direct object), so dative and accusative are sort of sub-categories of the objective as we now understand it.

In practice, the dative is almost always governed by prepositions. So you might say that "whom" is what you use when you want to say "who" after a preposition.

What's a preposition? It's a word from the following list: aboard, about, above, absent, across, after, against, along, alongside, amid, amidst, among, amongst, around, as, aslant, astride, at, athwart, atop, barring, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, despite, down, during, except, failing, following, for, from, in, inside, into, like, minus, near, next, notwithstanding, of, off, on, onto, opposite, out, outside, over, past, per, plus, regarding, round, save, since, than, through, throughout, till, times, to, toward, towards, under, underneath, unlike, until, up, upon, via, with, within, without, worth.

... and even that's not the whole rule because you can sometimes use "whom" for the subject of a sentence (a "nominative whom"). But, unless you're very sure you know what you're doing, don't.

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