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Please have a look at Is “sparkle” the correct word? The question consists of asking if the right word was used, with nothing said about the goals the writer wants to achieve. (We require that for critique questions.) We received this on Writers this morning.

I closed it as vague, and I'd like to know why the question was sent to us? This is not a critique question, it's just a vague, unclear question tagged "critique".

Edit: The question has been clarified a bit and re-opened on Writers.

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  • I was the first to vote to close - as "too localised", not because it was "off-topic" and should have been on writers.se. Google Books has 20,000 instances of "flashed/coursed through my mind", against 13 for "sparkled through my mind". I simply commented to OP that his usage was "acceptable" (if unusual/creative), and voted to close on the grounds it would not be of significant interest to future visitors on ELU. No more so on writers.se, apparently.
    – FumbleFingers
    Feb 24 '12 at 18:58
  • Thanks, everybody; the information posted here is proving helpful.
    – Goodbye Stack Exchange
    Feb 25 '12 at 17:12
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Not being one who voted to move, the people who did vote to migrate were:

migrated to writers.stackexchange.com by FumbleFingers, Lynn, MetaEd, Kris, RegDwight Ѭſ道♦ 6 hours ago

While not necessarily the best fit for Writers in its current form, I would hazard the guess that the OP's wording of "Is sparkle correct in this context?" gives the impression that he is looking to make the best word choice for some type of (unstated) purpose, rather than looking to make sure his word is "correct" in English.

I would ping RegDwight in chat to speak with him about the migration, as he cast the last vote.

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  • I'm not trying to place blame; I'm more interested in understanding this as general policy than anything else, but I'll do that. Thanks.
    – Goodbye Stack Exchange
    Feb 22 '12 at 17:13
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    I think it might have to do with whether a moderator votes to close, or 5 regular users do--in the case of the latter I don't think questions are moved without talking to a mod from the destination site.
    – simchona
    Feb 22 '12 at 17:14
  • Yeah that's exactly why I voted to move it. I don't patronize Writers so I'm not sure exactly what the rules are there, only that it didn't fit here and I thought I'd seen somewhere that proofreading type questions were a better fit for Writers.
    – Lynn
    Feb 25 '12 at 23:57
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I guess that, as there is nothing grammatically incorrect about using sparkle in that sentence, the question has been understood as being about writing style, and voted to be migrated on Writers.

The users who voted to migrate probably didn't know the question would be considered a critique question (the tag was added after migration), nor did they know you have restrictions on that type of questions.

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