The Best Article Published In October Will Win £100!

Want to put your ideas out there? Want the chance to win some cash doing it? You have found the write (apologies) place…

Emma Sky has named Anastasia Kyriacou the winner of theriskyshift.com’s best article during October. Anastasia’s piece argued that the current university environment has changed from an academic institute into a social milieu of competition driven by trivial factors. Outer appearance and party behaviour has become the most important factor for a student to be socially accepted in the student pecking order. If a student is not willing to subject himself/herself to this competition, he/she cannot be part of normal student life.

Read the full article here. Congratulations Anastasia!

Every article published on these pages through the month of October will be automatically entered into a competition to win £100. To enter, send your article to {[email protected]} with a headshot and a 2/3 line bio. Make sure you give a quick read through the rules & guidelines below as they will offer some tips and tricks to help you maximize your chances of winning. Remember to sign up to our newsletter, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter to keep up to date with how the competition is progressing!

After adding up how much our readers like your piece, the social media score, with how much we like your piece, the editors’ score, the top three pieces will be presented to Emma Sky who has very kindly agreed to act as adjudicator.

Emma’s areas of expertise include Iraq, post-9/11 interventions, Middle Eastern politics and counter-insurgency. She has worked with the highest tiers of the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Generals Odierno and Petraeus, and has significant experience managing development programmes for national and international bodies. She is currently the Peter and Patricia Gruber Fellow in Global Justice at Yale University.

You can read an interview with Emma about Iraq here.

Scoring, Eligibility & The Prize: Rules & Guidelines

1. Scoring

• The Social Media Score: 60% of each article’s score will be decided by how well our readers respond to it. For every facebook like, tweet, linkedin share, or Google +1 that the article receives it will earn 1 point. This will then be turned into a percentage score (so the top scoring article will receive the full 60%). Authors are permitted to encourage their friends to engage with the article, but it is worth spending more time writing a quality piece than relying on your friends to boost your score. To make sure that the best pieces are those that score the highest, the social media element is tempered by editors as follows…
• The Editors’ Score: The remaining 40% will be divided up into 4 sections that delineate the four areas we look for in contributions: provocative, current, constructive, and factually well-grounded (read more on this here). Three of our editors will read each piece published in October and give each a mark out of 10 for the aforementioned categories. The average of our editors’ marks will then be added to each piece.
• The Winner: Once all the scores have been tallied up, the top three pieces will be presented to Emma Sky who will decide the winner. Emma’s decision is final and cannot be challenged.

• The winner will be announced on Friday 16th November.
• The winner will receive £100. Payment can be by bank transfer or Paypal, whichever is preferred. Any fees charged (Paypal fees for example) will be deducted from the prize amount.
• The winner will be required to allow us to use his/her identity and excerpts from his/her article in promotional material.

Photo credit: Images of Money

Tagged Article, Competition, October, theriskyshift.com, Win £100, Writing