Winning Writing Tips

For everyone who's entering our contests, we want to give you all a few tips and ideas that'll help you maximize your chances of winning. Remember, our contests are considered writing and blogging contests. Visitors come and vote on and rate your entries and stories, and then based on those ratings, the winners are determined.

Remember, this is a competition against other entries, so how visitors rate your story are going to depend on your ability to communicate through writing.

Here are some tips we suggest you use.

1. [ONE LINERS SAY NOTHING]
Our contests may ask simple questions, but simple answers are not the ones that'll end up winning. If you look at the winners of our previous contests, you'll notice that the one liners are consistently the lowest ranked entries. The winners and the highest ranked entries are all able to walk us through a story or communicate the opinions and ideas of the author very thoughtfully.

A single sentence in the end will lose out to a well written and well thought out story.

2. [USE PARAGRAPHS!! - WRITING STYLE COUNTS]
if we wrote like this...and kept it going on for an entire page...lemme ask you if you would be very interested in reading the whole thing or much less be willing to give it anything close to 5 stars. It just looks like it keeps on going and going and going as one giant block of text that basically doesn't look very attractive to read. Most people are probably going to either give it just one star because it causes a headache immediately by just looking at it or because they'll assume it's just poor quality because it looks like the writer probably spent no time thinking about it at all. That or people are just going to skip it because most people are not going to want to read a giant block of text because it just doesn't look appealing. Don't write one single giant paragraph!

So for those of you who didn't read that giant block of text above, you probably know that giant blocks of text are NOT what people want to read. If they do read it, they'll probably just skim it and don't give it much credit.

So separate your ideas out into paragraphs. Don't be afraid of the ENTER button! It's your friend! Also be aware of spelling errors, proper grammar, and proper language use in general.

A well written entry that's easy and enjoyable to read is going to win over a poorly written one done in haste and without consideration.

3. [ENGAGE YOUR READERS - FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT]
So many of you have really fantastic ideas or stories to write about. Sometimes they end up falling flat because it gets too long to read, or because sometimes, honestly, it just gets boring.

If you're going to write a story that's got some length to it, make sure you engage your readers and make them want to keep on reading until the end. If you lose their interest in the beginning, they have every right to stop reading, skip you, or even give you a low rating.

So engage them, string them along, and lead them through the whole story. Keep them interested enough to read the whole story. Entries that get read all the way through will usually earn higher ratings than ones where they're just glanced at.



Check back for more tips.