|
Beginner
to Contest Winner - Part 3
by
Lynne Suzanne
Your best chance of success is to enter those competitions
which comprise two parts.
The
first part is usually a task, and can take the form
of factual questions, multiple choice questions, anagrams,
how many words can you make from the product name or
prize, wordsearches, crosswords, spot the differences,
identifying places, buildings or people, photography,
inventing recipes, or even putting features into order
of merit.
The
second part of the competition is the tiebreaker. Whilst
captions, estimations, and other tasks are used, more
often than not the tiebreaker will be a sentence completion.
Compers refer to these as ‘slogan comps’,
for example:
"I want to win a holiday with promoter’s wine
because’`I w-h-ine for a `grape’ escape."
You
may be one of thousands of people who never enter slogan
competitions, either because you think only other people
win or because you haven’t yet learn how to write
a winning slogan.
There’s
a knack to writing successful slogans and a skill you
can learn.
It’s
all down to word play. `Fit’s my New Year Resolution’,
won me a £1,500 health resort break, whilst `Golden
opera-tune-ity’ scooped a £2,000 music system.
"It’s
a fluke", said my friends, when car number one
came along. "Ten words for a Ford Fiesta!"
`Christmas
goodies, exciting show, supermarket’s quality,
I’m all aglow’.
"That’s
not very good", said an honest friend.
What she didn’t know was it scored highly for aptness.
For you see, I’d noticed that the store’s
current advertising slogan was `I’m glowing with
supermarket’. A twist of their slogan, bring in
the Christmas theme, add a dash of rhyme’.
All the `write’ ingredients for a recipe for success.
You can do this too.
Start
on the prize-winning trail writing down the lead-in
line for your tiebreaker slogan, for example:
‘I
buy my plants at this garden centre because’
Then
make a list of apt words, such as:
seeds,
plants, dig, sow, water, hoe, tend, tree, branches,
twigs
Underline
those with double meanings which lend themselves to
word play,
for
instance: sow, branch
Try
to make words from other words, for example:
tremendous
tree-mendous
Next
step is to build these words into phrases. You may want
to say, `I buy my plants at this garden centre because
`they’re good, they offer tremendous value and
I can buy them at any branch’
Sounds
good but when you dig in a little word play, your slogan
hopefully blossoms into a prize greenhouse, mower or
garden makeover.
`I
buy my plants at this garden centre because, they’re
hoe sow good, offer tree-mendous value, at any branch’.
Researching
this fascinating subject, I uncovered over fifty styles
of slogan writing, which not only scoop big competition
prizes for you, but reap rewards in business too.
Clever
captions or eye-catching headlines for your press releases,
sales and promotional literature.
Writing
competition slogans is great pun, sorry great fun. I
hope you’re `twigging’ on!
©
Copyright 2002 Lynne Suzanne www.win-with-lynne.co.uk
About the author
Lynne Suzanne is a freelance writer, consultant and
speaker. She has written four books on winning prize
competitions and slogan writing and presents Win With
Lynne Roadshows and marketing seminars.
FREE Win With Lynne Expert Guide to Winning competition
prizes
http://www.win-with-lynne.co.uk
|
