First of all, what is a sifter? A sifter is a person who pre-judges the entries of a competition before the main judge sees them. It’s the sifter’s job to sort the wheat from the chaff and to give only the best submissions to the judge for consideration. This means that the sifter is the first person who your poem needs to impress if it’s going to progress to the next round of judging.
Large, prestigious prizes use sifters because it would be impractical to run such a competition without them. One judge simply can’t read 10,000 entries before a deadline, it’s just not possible, so they need the help of sifters. When you enter a competition, you won’t know who the sifters are, but sifters are always highly qualified and experienced critics, they will typically be published (and even prize-winning) writers themselves. So, while the sifter may not be the judge who was advertised, they are just as much of an expert when it comes to discerning good writing from bad. This means that your poems are in good hands and that a competition which uses sifters is still fair.
I’m a sifter and this is how it works:
I get randomly assigned a batch of poems, anything from 100 to 400 or more. When I’m done with that batch, I’m given another. However big the batch, I must choose a maximum of 10% and a minimum of 5% to pass on to the next round of judging. Limits vary from competition to competition. This is done to ensure that the judge has enough material to choose between, but not so much material that they can’t get the job done. Healthy limits make for a healthy competition. But, this means that if I get a batch of particularly good poems, then unfortunately for the entrants, I have to choose between them in order to stay below my maximum. So, don’t give me a reason not to choose your poem. Sometimes, when a call is particularly close, I’ve had to choose one poem over another because of something as simple as a misplaced comma.
In the series of blogs that follow, I’ll give you some tips and hints that will make a sifter more likely to choose your poem over someone else’s. The same tips apply to main judges too, since whether you’re a judge or a sifter, you’re doing basically the same job.
Cat Woodward
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