How to win the Fat and Happy Writing contest.

During the course of the Fat and Happy writing contest, I have had many emails from members that believe there is some mysterious recipe for winning the contest. I decided that I would share my experiences, in the hope that they help others to achieve wins within the contests to come. As many of the contests have similar rules, it is hoped that this will help with future contests.

Are new members welcome ?

Every member of Helium is welcome to join in with the competitions, although new members would do well to read around and see the quality that is expected rather than to dash in enthusiastically writing away and not realizing the writing standards involved. Magazine style articles do well on Helium rather than those personal ones that relate your experiences, unless they are entitled testimonies, which are for specific personal commentary.

How do I approach the competition ?

Many people have different approaches. Personally, I have found that mine works particularly well. Study all the categories and see which presents the most titles that you could write on. At a surface glance sometimes this looks difficult, though the more familiar you get with the titles, the easier the concept becomes of writing in the subjects offered. Reading others helps you to understand whether you have some original offering to make or whether you can write better than is already on the site, although here, being careful never to copy others. Copying is strictly against the rules.

Having chosen the channel in which you wish to compete, paste the titles into Word or whatever word processing package you use, and study them closely. Here, I find that if I plan an article, it comes over as much more fluent, and I tend to think of a great opening line, decide where the article is going and what the information will be useful for, finishing with a concluding paragraph that rounds the article off nicely.

It's a little like constructing an informative article for the public to read and an example here is a recent one that I wrote on piercing. I asked myself what would people consider piercing want to know ? The answers gave me the basis for my article:

*The procedure.
*The pain factor.
*Looking after the piercing
*The inconvenience
*The satisfaction of having it done
*The cleanliness factor
*Safe practices
*Overall conclusion.

By building up criteria before writing, what you are doing is making up the spine

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