Mental Meanderings

An unfair rating? With explaination

Well, it's finally happened, a rating which I feel is completely unjustified. It brings me to question what it is that you give points for when you are rating. I would have thought the quality of the writing, the clarity of the meaning, the layout, they flow, etc. constitutes a large portion of what make a poem terrible, average, or excellent.

Not according to one of my reviews for "Destiny? Doom!!!" 
With a 1 star rating jvm1983 wrote:
It's a nice poem. You can more positive content to balance the negativeness. Just a suggestion and I understand all authors have their own styles.

Now obviously this had me going, what the? Didn't he just say it's a nice poem? He suggested that the poem needed some positive to bring the negative into balance and then admitted that 'all authors have their own style'. Well, I figure perhaps he just didn't want to mention why the poem was so terrible so I wrote a reply asking him to tell me why the poem was terrible and not just average.

I also explained why I felt this particular poem should remain entirely negative: In this case I've focused on the bad in a sense of silent scream, in a dark moment in life (the deepest moment of shame, or greif, or despair) it is impossible to see the light side of things. This poem instills that dark moment, seeing only the inherant evil of mankind.

Well, he was kind enough to reply:
Do not be discouraged if I gave you low rating. Let me tell you why gave you this score. It's not because your poem is terrible, in the contrary, its original and well written. The score given goes to the content.

I don't write that perfect but I keep trying and practicing. But sometimes we as humankind feel desperate because of a grim future. However I believe that humankind can stop creating this reality of doom and begin to create a reality of hope. I felt this is what the poem was lacking: hope.

Ok, stop me if I'm mistaken but didn't he just say the poem is not terrible, it's original and well written. The only thing that makes this poem only worthy of a single star is it's lack of hope? I can understand why we might prefer to see hope in everything in life but to be honest, when I wrote this poem I didn't see much in mankind as it currently lives. It would take a phenomenal event/s to bring mankinds current path away from the tragic end this poem foretell.

Anyway, let me get off my soapbox. Obviously this is one reader who didn't appreciate my outlook and decided to display that in a low rating. Thankfully this poem has recieved enough 5 and 4.5 ratings to withstand such brutal opinionism. I'm glad I do not rate writing on content alone as there are a great deal of people here who do not share my opinion on things. This is a writing community and while content might cause a small decline from perfect to imperfect, it's the writing, and creativity that I judge for more merit.