Word contests

A lot of competitions require some sort of rhyme or slogan, sometimes as a tie-breaker, sometimes as the basis of the contest.

Fortunately, the sponsor of the competition usually indicates what sort of criteria are required from entries. Make sure you fully understand what is being asked and do your best to come up with something that entirely and perfectly fits with what they are looking for.

If you are being asked to write about why love a particular product, or to describe it in a particular way, you probably won’t win unless you have actually used it. So if you can, buy the product and make full use of it, while at the same time trying to pay attention to it in a way that will be helpful in terms of your contest.

If you are serious about entering lots of word-based competitions, it can also be helpful to have plenty of reference material to hand – a good English dictionary, a thesaurus and maybe even an encyclopaedia and some specialist volumes such as rhyming dictionaries, synonyms and antonyms and a book of quotations. These aren’t essential, but they may just give you the edge.

Sometimes you’ll get a blinding flash of inspiration and the phrase or slogan will come to you in a moment of clarity. More often than not, however, you’ll have to work for your solution, trying things out and trying to find the most stylish way of conveying the message you want to get across. This can take patience and practice, but you’ll need to persevere if you want to get anywhere.

There are a number of techniques that can be used to liven up your entries:

Alliteration: This is a particular favour, as long as it is done subtly - “Crack the code of the casinos!” rather than over the top - “Fine food and fantastic family fun for everyone”.

Personification: This is where you give an inanimate object the personality of a living creature. This is highly popular among judges, as people have more affinity characteristics and behaviour than they do with inanimate adjectives, meaning such entries are more likely to be able to be used for marketing purposes.

Comparisons: You can either use a simile (as thick as mud, sweet like chocolate) or preferably, imply the simile by using a metaphor – “feather soft clothes” for instance.

Pun or play on words: If you can give a sentence an implied double meaning, create a variation on a word, or even use a deliberate spelling mistake to achieve a certain effect, this can be a very successful approach.

Clauses: Many slogans and catchphrases come in the form of a pair clauses (eg the pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with) or even a triad (eg. to end corruption in high places, don't try to end corruption, end high places) of clauses separated by commas.

Word-based contest are less popular than they once were, largely due to the man-hours required to sift through and judge the entries, but also because judging them is not the easiest thing to do and there are inevitably going to be complaints and follow up letters from competitors who feel there is no possible way on earth that their entry wasn’t the best one.

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