Is there a way to change thread titles to let people in the Writing Workshop know you have added another draft?
i don't believe so... you could ask a moderator to do it, but i'm not sure they can, either... why don't you pm one--or daniel--and ask?
Agreed. There is one member who posts the new draft in the original post, then "hides" the older drafts within spoiler tags, giving verbiage before each tag as to which version of the draft is hidden within. I think this a actually a very clever and neatly presented way to keep your critic's eye on the latest revision (so that they don't mistakenly critique earlier drafts) without deleting the older drafts. Leaving the older drafts is of great benefit not only to you the writer, but also to critics willing to look a litter deeper in the stages of life of an MS, to see where you have been, where you are going, what advice has already been given and applied, etc. This method keeps all that together, neatly, within the confines of the first post, making it very user friendly to your critics. This is the latest draft of my story: blah, blah, blah Second draft Spoiler second draft blah, blah, blah First draft Spoiler first draft blah, blah, blah The forum rules read differently, but I feel the rule as it is does not take into account the fact that later revisions of a work posted at the tail end of a thread get quickly lost in the shuffle, especially if you, the writer, are actively working the thread, making revisions, and are getting a good bit of critics. Many people quote a whole work when they critique so the posts start to all look the same. A revision 2 pages deep in a thread scrolls by and looks like someone's critique.
The problem with this approach is it's harder to relate critiquers' comments to which draft they are critiquing. If updates are always posted at the end of the thread, you know that all comments preceding that draft were against an earlier draft. I do agree that using [NOPARSE][/NOPARSE] tags in conjunction with a "See my updated draft further down the thread" message can help prevent accidental critique of an out of date draft, and is a good suggestion to add to the How to Use the Writing Workshop post.
It's not oft I disagree with you, Cog, but I do here. The OP of a thread knows too well when critiques come in and can easily keep track of which critiques came after a revision post because, frankly, they will have been waiting for them to happen. And since it's inappropriate and rightly against forum policy for critics to critique previous critiques, their sense of what came when is of no consequence, it's not something they should be commenting on within the flow of a thread anyway.
Critique threads do not exist solely, or even primarily, for the person whose writing is being critiqued. They are there for all to see, to follow and learn from BOTH sides of the process.
I'm not arguing that. You know better than most how I feel about the critiquing process, Cog. There would be no loss for the critic in this method which I espouse myself because it's plainly intuitive. The OP is going to post that there is a new revision, which cannot be argued to be a thread bump because had they posted the revision at the tail end, the thread would have naturally bumped up all the same. That's a wash. That notice is a demarcator for the OP and for the critics. The thread is actually cleaner and more easily parsed that way, in my opinion. What is to be critiqued is always in the same place.
But someone could follow the changes that were made to each draft by comparing them and looking at comments that people made. Also one thing I noticed when I did it is that when you edit the first post, the thread doesn't get bumped, so one can put the comment "Revision # posted" and any critiques after that post will obviously refer to that revision.
Substantive additions to a thread are never treated as thread bumps. I'm sorry, but I still think it's clearer for the member who peruses an existing thread to follow both sides of the process if every step appears chronologically.
I've already seen this, but I still think the chronological method is clearer to someone observing the progress of the critique cycle. I think your point is that the observer sees the progression of DRAFTS more easily with your approach. But that is not the progression of the draft-critique-revision cycle, which is what the Writing Workshop strives to explore and improve.
