Tie-breakers and other judged entries

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

What you are being asked for

A tie-breaker is often a single sentence, finished from a stem: “I love this tea because…”. Sometimes it is a caption, a six-word review, a photo with a title, a recipe named after a place. The promoter wants something they can publish without wincing, that sounds like a person who understood the product, and that is not a copy of last year’s winner.

Read the stem twice. People lose these on relevance. If the sentence must praise a specific feature, praise that feature. If it must mention a place, mention it plainly. Cleverness that forgets the brief is just a nicer way to be off-topic.

A way to draft without staring at the wall

1. Write the dull true version. “I love this tea because it is strong and it wakes me up before the school run.”
2. Underline the concrete bit. The school run is doing more work than the word strong.
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. Most limits are there for a reason.
5. Cut any word you could swap onto a rival product. Specific beats portable.

A pun is allowed to survive if it is also specific. A pun that could sit on any hamper, any car or any moisturiser is the house style of entries that do not win. Judges see hundreds of them. Yours will not be the one that suddenly charms by rhyme alone.

Taste, brand, and the imaginary reader

You are not writing for a poetry magazine. You are writing for a brand that wants to look friendly in its own voice. Match the temperature. A children’s cereal does not want a cynical joke. A chilli sauce might. Look at how they write on the pack or the page, and sit a step nearer to that than to your group chat.

Avoid anything a lawyer would flinch at: rival brand names, medical claims, jokes about the prize being the only good thing in your life. Warm, particular, and safe to print is a better target than edgy.

Photos, recipes and made things

Follow the format they asked for. A beautiful photo in the wrong shape is an admin problem, not a hidden advantage. Natural light and a tidy background beat a filter. For recipes, write something you have cooked, with quantities a stranger could use. Judges and readers can smell a recipe that has never met a pan.

If the rules say original, make it original. Copying a winning line from a round-up post is a good way to be disqualified and a poor way to learn. You can learn from the shape of a winner — it was concrete, it was short, it named the product’s actual virtue — without borrowing the sentence.

How much time to spend

Twenty focused minutes is plenty for a one-line tie-break. An hour is plenty for a photo if you already have the thing in the house. Spending a whole evening on a prize you are lukewarm about is how skill contests start to feel like unpaid copywriting. The craft advantage only exists if you still like doing it.

Keep a private swipe file of your own lines that you liked and did not use, not of other people’s winners. Next time a similar stem appears, you are starting from your voice rather than from a blank box. That is a small, real edge. It is not a system. Systems are what people sell when they cannot teach taste.