Rac7hel's dashboard

Nick, I just realized something that I think has probably always bothered me. I've always felt that a story's rating is entirely irrelevant, because it's based on the ratings of the individual chapters. If there's a chapter that carries along the story's plot line well but isn't particularly amazing by itself, it's not likely to get super great ratings. But the story as a whole could still be spectacular, and may not deserve to get knocked down a point just because of one chapter.

I tend to judge a chapter against the rest of the chapters in the story anyway. I think that's how a chapter should be rated. There are some light-hearted and ridiculous stories where a silly chapter fits in perfectly and deserves a 5, but that doesn't mean that the story itself is better than another story whose criteria are intrinsically more strict.

A good example is the story where we write about why we write on Protagonize. Being nonfiction, there's not much criteria on which to base a rating other than the actual reason itself. Pretty much any reason for writing is a good one, so there's no way I could rate any of those chapters poorly. Yet I can think of many stories on the site which I would rate higher than that one if I had that option.

My suggestion is to let us rate the story as a whole, and of course we'll keep updating our rating as the story progresses. This would do a much better job reflecting the quality of the story. I think that the overall story rating should be used to rank the stories, and should be displayed more prominently than the average rating of the chapters.