What Did You Learn from Judging Unpublished Contests?

It’s contest season, so lots of us have been judging unpublished manuscripts for Golden Heart and other awards.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I read a stack of unpublished work, I learn a lot about craft. We’re all so close to our own WIPs, it’s hard to be objective about what we’re doing wrong or right, but when I’m reading work by anonymous strangers, patterns start jumping out at me.

The set I got to judge this year were all impressively solid—all the writers put sentences together we...