The Style Invitational is a humor/wordplay contest through which we seek to bring a variety of clever, timely, irreverent humor every week to the readers of The Washington Post. While our ultimate goal is to get you to write great stuff for us for less than peanuts, we (a.k.a. “I”) do aim to judge the contest as fairly and carefully as we reasonably can.
Here’s a list of rules and guidelines on how to enter, and some explanation of how we do things.
The Style Invitational
The Style Invitational is The Post’s weekly humor/wordplay contest, serving up since 1993 an irreverent mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- haughty and potty -- in genres ranging from neologisms to cartoon captions to elaborate song parodies. A new contest appears at washingtonpost.com/styleinvitational every Friday.
How to enter
First, read over the week’s contest directions carefully — it’s sad to see a list of 25 entries of words that didn’t begin with a letter between B and G, or whatever the restrictions were in that week’s contest.
Submissions are by e-mail to losers@washpost.com. (If you really cannot use e-mail, you may fax them to 202-334-4312, but e-mail is way, way more convenient for us.) The deadline is midnight (in whichever time zone you’re in) on the date stated in the contest directions, usually two Mondays after the contest is announced, but occasionally on a Tuesday if Monday is a holiday. (If you have an emergency and you can’t make the deadline, go ahead and send your entry the next day; I won’t throw it out.)
You may submit up to 25 entries to a contest — any exceptions will be noted — and they may be in a single e-mail. Please don’t use any special formatting on the entries — columns, charts, pretty shapes and colors, etc.; these invariably end up all messed up on our end. Just plain old text. And while it’s fine to compose your entries on Word or another word-processing program and copy them in, please do not put your entries in an attachment — put them right into the body of your e-mail. Sometimes I’ll print out all the entries en masse, and an attachment won’t print. (There are exceptions for a few contests involving photos or graphics.)
Please put some space between your individual entries; it’s very hard to read a long single-spaced list. On Word, you can set the paragraphs (under Format/ Paragraphing) for double-spacing or even 1.5 lines. Don’t add space between the lines of a single poem, however.
We strongly prefer not to credit two or more people for a single entry. On rare contests that are more collaborative (e.g., one person would think up the joke; the other would make a graphic), we’ll make an exception.
Be sure to include at the top or bottom of your entry:
Your real name (NO PSEUDONYMS, and we won’t withhold a name)
Your postal address
A usable phone number
An e-mail address where we may contact you, if it’s a different address from the one on your e-mail itself.
Be sure to include the correct week number in the subject line of the e-mail: I often sort the e-mails into folders just by looking at the subject lines. If you write “Week 902” on your entry for Week 901, I probably won’t see it until a week too late.
You may suggest revised titles — that’s the alternate headline for next week’s results, published at the end of the column — and honorable-mention subheads in the same e-mail as your entries or as a separate e-mail; doesn’t matter to us. Don’t just put them only in the subject line of your e-mail, as we used to suggest under an earlier judging system.
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