Prize Desk USA

Skill

Essays, photos and slogans

This is the page that can actually change your results, within the limit that a judge still has to like what you did. Random drawings do not care if you are clever. A slogan contest can.

What you are being asked for

Sometimes it is a sentence finished from a stem. Sometimes a caption, a six-word review, a photo with a title, a recipe, a short essay about why a place matters. The sponsor wants something they can publish without wincing, that sounds like a person who understood the brief, and that is not a copy of last year’s winner.

Read the prompt twice. People lose these on relevance. If the line must mention a product feature, mention that feature. If it must name a park or a city, name it plainly. Cleverness that forgets the brief is just a nicer way to be off topic.

A way to draft

  1. Write the dull true version first.
  2. Underline the concrete bit. A school run, a specific stove, a trail you have actually walked.
  3. Try three endings that keep the concrete bit and add a turn of phrase, not a pun for its own sake.
  4. Read them aloud. If you run out of breath, the judge will too.
  5. Cut any word you could paste onto a rival brand. Specific beats portable.

Match the temperature of the brand. A children’s cereal does not want a cynical joke. A hot sauce might. Avoid rival names and claims a lawyer would flinch at. Warm, particular, and safe to print beats edgy.

Photos and made things

Follow the format they asked for. A beautiful photo in the wrong shape is an admin problem. Natural light and a tidy background beat a filter. For recipes, write something you have cooked. If the rules say original, make it original. You can learn from the shape of a past winner — it was concrete, it was short — without borrowing the sentence.

Twenty focused minutes is plenty for a one-line caption. An hour is plenty for a photo if the subject is already in the house. Spending a whole evening on a prize you are lukewarm about is how contests start to feel like unpaid copywriting. Keep a private file of your own unused lines, not of other people’s winners.