  Contests & Activities
This week: Contest Prompts: Good, Bad, or Mediocre? Edited by: 🦄🏳️🌈Sapph  
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The purpose of this newsletter is to share my thoughts, ideas, and experience with anything and everything relating to contests and activities. Information from me to you on entering and running activities here on Writing.Com.
Today's Topic
Contest Prompts
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| ASIN: B00KN0JEYA |
Product Type: Kindle Store
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Amazon's Price: $ 4.99
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This newsletter is going to focus on those who run contests and the prompts that are chosen to be written about. Most contests require the entrants to focus on some type of prompt rather than leaving it completely open but when does a prompt keep people from entering? Some prompts can be good but others can be too restricting or not interesting enough to keep members interested.
Whether you like prompts or not, they almost seem necessary in the world of contests. A prompt could be an image, a quote, a few words or even the genre. Here are a few tips I've come up with on how to choose a prompt:
How can you choose prompts that keep potential entrants interested?
 Don't box contestants in, keep it a bit open.
 Don't require exacts, allow interpretation.
 Don't use a combined prompt such as image and quote, let them choose one or the other.
 Have more than one possible prompt choice.
 Make the prompt original, don't just recycle it.
 Don't use a prompt you wouldn't want to write for yourself.
A prompt (in the way we use it in this instance) would be defined as an act of assisting or encouraging a hesitating speaker or the word or phrase spoken as a reminder to an actor of a forgotten word or line. The main key here is that it is encouraging, helpful and should be seen in the way of nudging along entrants rather than holding them back.
The next time you're coming up with a prompt, remember to keep it simple, keep it open, keep it interesting, and most of all make it encouraging, not restrictive.
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These contests have prompts that I found interesting and intriguing! Most were chosen because of the openness of the prompts.
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My question for you this time: If you host a contest, how do you decide on the prompts?
Question from before: Do you think there are many original ideas for contest or activities out there any more? Do you strive to come up with original ideas in this area?
Crys-not really here  replied: There are definitely some cool contests out there. I love contests that go above and beyond a picture or word prompt and ask me to combine two seemingly unrelated genres, or try a new poetry form, or invent my own poetry form! I am very picky about what I enter because I get tired of seeing the same concepts over and over. That's one of the reasons why I dislike most raffles on the site. All of your suggestions were great for members who want to run contests.
BIG BAD WOLF is Howling  replied: Sometimes the problem is that no one gets the idea, and passes you by.
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| ASIN: B01DSJSURY |
Product Type: Kindle Store
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Amazon's Price: $ 5.99
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Contests & Activities: November 13, 2013 Issue [#5997]
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