Conversation:

... lovely to see the first person turning up un-selfconsciously in entries; it was agonising watching entries being contorted to exclude it for no better reason than the cargo cult said to do it like that.

It's like hearing the second boot finally drop after 9 years, an astonishing, unexpected and profound relief.

Thank you.

Ben

I think it took the author by surprise too, but we're looking at being encouraging rather than the opposite.


There are some good reasons for writing in the third person, but they did not apply to the Entry featured this week on the front page.

Thanks for the appreciation Ben, we do our best

I hope you weren't being entirely serious, Mrs Z, when you compared those who developed and upheld h2g2's house style with members of a cargo cult...

Not entirely serious, but not entirely flippant either. You can take the girl out of the UnderGuide but you can't take the UnderGuide out of the girl.

It may be a generational thing. One of the reasons I gradually lost interest in contributing to the Guide was what I saw as the slavish and rather unimaginative adherence to the Edited Guidelines prevalent then. We are talking a long time ago now, my Edited Entries are all in my pre-Single Sign-on ID.

I drifted away because at that time getting an entry into the Guide seemed to be a tickbox exercise. Excellent first person pieces were rejected or maimed while some of the dreariest stuff was getting in. At that time neither the Covert Stammerer nor the Gingerbread house would have made it in in their current form.

I'm happy to hear that things got saner as regimes changed and times moved on, and I am truly thrilled to read the proof for myself now on the front page.

I'm also aware I need to start putting myself through the mill; I have two entries I'd like to write, one on the fall of HBOS and the other on internet research and the possible life or possible death of the Blue Peter elephant.

B

Oh, hell, that is going to seem really harsh.

It *IS* a long time ago. I did what I could to try to change things (I believe in "put up or shut up") and I only drifted away when I felt I couldn't do any more to change them. Perhaps I should have stuck it out longer than I did.

Fast-forwarding over half a decade, I was impressed by the variety and quality of the entries I had to pick and choose among when I was putting together the book for the bid, which only goes to show that I should perhaps have stuck it out rather than drifting off when I did.

B

Whoops, I forgot to sign my post earlier (maybe you guessed).

I've read some great first-person entries, as you say, and I'm sure we're a little more relaxed about them now. However, I can understand why, with far more submissions of more variable quality, style was more strictly enforced in the past.

Scalability will be one of our great challenges now

Icy