Five Stars For Everything

My star rating philosophy.

I give five stars for everything.

This has not always been the case. For a long time, I would give star ratings commensurate with my perception of the quality of the writing or item in front of me. Before I get deeper into my own philosophy about this, here is a link to the site's official stance on the subject: "The Star Rating System"  I will not knowingly repeat anything that's on that page, but we're discussing the same subject, so there might be some overlap.

The Past

One Star

Unless asked to do so, I have never given just one star to anything. That's just crude. There are a few poetry activities that have it as a running joke that getting one star is the goal. So, I will obviously oblige. Even if I think the poem shout get more stars.

Two Stars

I've given marked items with two stars when I found:
Excessive amounts of misspelled words. Excessive meaning that it affected the reading. Words not meaning what the text needed, typos so deep that some words were not actual words.
The item doesn't hold up on its own. The story/plot/theme is not recognizable. What is this about? What am I looking at? Why is this even posted here?

Three Stars

As a newcomer to the site, I read that as hobby writers, this is the rating that most of us should get here. This was to be the Goldilocks rating for a first draft that was largely free of typos and only needed a little polishing, but was a good piece.
The truth is that what constitutes "good writing" is arbitrary.

Four Stars

One of my most hated phrases from reviewers or people who give out ratings for anything is to throw down a blanket, "There is always room for improvement." To me, that means that a four star rating doesn't even need to exist. Because it's just there to give those never happy people something to tear others down.

Five Stars

Elusive, special, reserved for masterpieces.
Who decides what constitutes a masterpiece? Writing is a living art. Tastes change over time. Novels that are considered "must read world literature" would not find a publisher nowadays.

The Present
 

If the option to receive stars has been turned on, I will choose five stars. Always. No exceptions. If I truly shouldn't give five stars, I just won't review the item at all. If I must, I can always send an email.

But why? Am I just making it too easy on myself? Why don't I want to grade writers like little kids in elementary school? Why don't I want people to feel bad about the effort they put forward? What is it in me that makes me shun this easy and one-stop-shop opportunity to slap a writer across the face before they've even had a chance to read my comments?

In my romantic notion of being a writer, we are all here to show off our writing. We worked on our text. We carefully selected an idea from the thousands in our mind. We sat down and chose words to describe our thoughts. We committed ourselves to be artists. And then, when the text was finished, we put it up here for the world to see. Those words were our babies. Little fragile stick figures borne from our minds just trying out life outside of the safety of our internal imagination.
Even if those words need crutches, band aids, better clothes, a complete make over, makeup, nip tuck: they are precious and worthy of love. They are worthy of five stars just for existing.

The real work of offering help for a text is not in tearing it down with less than five stars. It's in the review. It's in the constructive suggestions. It's in letting the author know what we're on their side and here for them if they want to go back into a text and keep working on it. That's why

I give five stars for everything.