Welcome to Constructive Criticism, nee Crosswords Without Pity. A little under two years ago, I started a community on LiveJournal under the name of Crosswords Without Pity, whose purpose was to provide an outlet for discussion of recently-published crosswords. I made weekly posts charting my assessments of the puzzles published during that week in the New York Times and the New York Sun, and highlighting any particular themes, entries, or clues that I felt merited further analysis. I discontinued my regular posts after about two months, but the community remained open for those who wished to post.
I recently decided that I wanted to start posting again. For those of you who followed the original CWP community, bear with me for a while, as I may repeat myself in some places. However, the general format will be a bit different, and I hope to cover puzzles from a broader range of venues than I did previously. In particular, each week I will post a chart rating the themes from the week’s puzzles, with each theme receiving a rating of 1 (good), 0, or -1 (bad), starting with the week of May 5-May 11. When I rate a theme as a 0 that usually means that I thought the idea was good, but I felt one or two of the theme entries should have been changed. I think this system will easier to maintain consistently than my previous system of numerically rating each theme on a 1-10 scale. If you feel there is some discrepancy in the way I am rating the themes--for instance, if I give a rating of 1 to a certain theme and a 0 to another theme of similar type and quality, then by all means ask me about it, and I will try to explain my reasoning.
I know that, along with most other forms of entertainment, there will be some subjectivity present in any attempt to review a crossword. However, I think that there are some specific characteristics of crosswords that can be pointed at, and even quantified, which can be used to compare the quality of one crossword or group of crosswords to another. Each weekly chart will also contain some of these statistics--in particular, for the first few weeks at least I will count the number of partials in each puzzle. I’ll explain why I chose this particular quantity in a future post.
Some ground rules and other random notes:
- Personal attacks of any sort will not be tolerated. This not only includes attacks directed at me or other commenters, but also attacks directed at the constructor/editor of the puzzles. “This puzzle has bad fill” is fine, “Joe Gridster’s crosswords suck” is not. Comments will be screened; if they violate this rule, I will not post them.
- I will be the only person with permission to post on the main page. If you have written something which you would like to appear on the main page, e-mail it to me and I may put it up.
- I know a fair number of crossword constructors personally, and I imagine that some of them will read this blog. Know that I mean no offense by my ratings, and in general, I have great respect for the vast majority of constructors, despite our perhaps differing aesthetics.
- Finally, I will not rate any puzzles of which I am a constructor or co-constructor. If and when puzzles with my byline appear, I happily invite anyone who wishes to send me their own critical comments, which I will post along with my comments on the rest of the week’s puzzles.
Thanks for reading,
Jeffrey.
8 comments:
Might I suggest scoring themes along two axes: concept and execution? That is, a clever theme with a clunker entry might be a +0 (or even +-), while a well-done seen-it-before theme (add 'F' to the beginning of three phrases, but the phrases chosen all yielded humorous results that we haven't seen before) might be a 0+. Something like the recent "Splits and Mergers" would probably garner a ++, etc.
Excellent suggestion, thank you! I'll definitely consider it; the only potential problem I foresee is that some types of themes (particularly ones early in the week) don't really have an "execution" aspect. One "phrases where the first word is a type of fruit" theme is pretty much the same as the next, for instance. I'll give it a whirl though.
I'm curious why you deleted the LiveJournal community? I thought it had some interesting commentary and discussions that were worth keeping around as an archive.
Hi Karen! I deleted it because, reading back over it, I was rather ashamed of a lot of the things I said, or more accurately, the way I said them. I think the 30-day deadline for undeletion hasn't passed yet, so I could open it back up. Were there any specific posts or comments that you think should be archived?
I was mainly recalling the discussion of human-vs.-computer contest in the Gridlock book. I thought that was interesting, particularly the inside information on how it was done.
In general, really, I found the discussions interesting. I didn't necessarily agree with everything you or others said, but I found the discussion of different points of view enlightening.
FWIW, I can't recall ever thinking "I can't believe he wrote that!" for anything you wrote. I do recall getting the impression you have strong opinions and very high standards.
OK, I undeleted the community. I should say, though, that my opinions about a few things have changed in the years of hiatus, so I don't necessarily stand by everything I wrote. Thanks for your interest :)
Thanks! (BTW I don't see my previous response to your question -- did I somehow send that directly to you vs. posting it?) I'm looking forward to the new commentary.
Oops! Sorry, I'm still getting the hang of this moderating comments stuff. The whole conversation is posted now.
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