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The trade secret that separates the successful award authors from the also-rans.

If you know how to use it, it will help you win the awards that will get you noticed, advance your career, and get your agency onto pitch-lists.

With the new year’s awards season just about kicking off, I’d like to let you in on one of the ‘trade secrets’ that separates the successful award authors from the also-rans. If you know how to use it, it will help you win the awards that will get you noticed, advance your career, and get your agency onto pitch-lists. If you don’t, you’re likely to miss out.

We’re going to be talking about facts and stories. The importance of them, the difference between them, and what that means, in practical terms, when it comes to constructing a winning entry.

Let’s start with Award Writing 101. You gather the facts and then you put them together to create a winning story. Simple, right?

But there’s a caveat. Whatever story you create, it’s going to be judged head-to-head with a whole range of competitors – and your biggest, most dangerous competitor isn’t always what you might think it is. Yes, you’re going to be up against the all the other entries in your category. But too many people forget to think it all the way through beyond this. Because, more importantly, you’re also going to be up against any alternative story a judge might be able to construct from the facts you present, or the facts you miss out.

You might present a basket of facts and graphs and you’ll say, This proves X. But a judge might take one look at it and say, Bullshit! It doesn’t prove that at all. In fact, it’s far more likely to prove Y.

Think about that for a while.

In the meantime, let’s take a brief detour. We’ll go by way of Stonehenge, and from there to Japan, Sardinia, Costa Rica and Greece.

Some time back there was a Scottish-born engineer and university professor by the name of Alexander Thom. For whatever reason, it was his hobby to take measurements of ancient stone circles. No, I don’t know why either. But over time, when he took a look at the numbers he’d collected, he came to realise that the builders of all of these monuments seemed to be using a common system of measurement. From Stonehenge in Wiltshire to Carnac in France to Brodgar in Orkney, they all seemed to be working in multiples of 2.72 feet, or 0.8297 metres. He sensed that he was onto something. He gave this measure a name: he called it the megalithic yard[1]. Then he went further. Many stone circles are aligned to the seasons. Thom worked out that if you multiply the length of a megalithic yard by the number of days in the year, it comes out out as equal to one second of the arc of the earth’s circumference, whatever that is.

He took this as evidence that the people of the late stone age were masters of mathematics and geometry. It was a great story.

Now let’s look at it in another way.

There weren’t many good roads in the late stone age. There was a lot of rough ground. It would have made sense, back then, to carry a walking stick to help you on your way, especially if you were walking over a stone-circle construction site. While you were at it, your stick might also have been a handy thing to use to measure the size of your megaliths. So how long would your stick be? Would it be something to do with the earth’s circumference, or would it be, perhaps, about as long as your leg. For a person of average height today, that’s about three feet. But people in those days were, on average, some three inches shorter than we are. So a stick as long as your leg would tend to be about three inches shorter than a modern one. And that’s your megalithic yard.

So, stone age hunter-gatherers were possessed of advanced mathematics. Or else they were possessed of sticks.[2] You pick which story you’d buy.

Moving closer to the present time you might have seen a similar battle of rival stories in the news on the subject of the world’s longevity ‘Blue Zones.’ These are the largely poor, rural regions where official statistics report unusually high numbers of people living to 100 and beyond. The Okinawa prefecture in Japan. The island of Sardinia. The Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. Icaria in Greece. It’s said that all these supercentenarians are the result of a simpler, more natural way of living, which Times journalist Emma Duncan summarises as ‘eating mostly fish and vegetables, doing without machines to help with house and garden work, filling our lives with a sense of purpose, and spending lots of time with friends and family[3]’.

It’s another great story.

But there’s also an alternative one. Dr Saul Newman, from the Oxford Institute of Population Aging, recently pointed out that the most important thing these regions have in common is actually a combination of bad official record-keeping and high levels of benefit fraud, with large numbers of families continuing to claim the pensions of people long since dead[4]. In one case, Japanese officials turning up to congratulate a man on his 111th birthday found a mummified corpse that had been dead in bed for at least 30 years.

All of which has important implications for your award entries. Because as well as constructing your own compelling story from the facts you have to hand, your job is also to catch and kill any other possible alternative stories that might undermine your case.

Many award templates have a section close to the end where you identify and discount any other factors that might have accounted for your success. It’s often treated as an afterthought and completed perfunctorily. That’s a big mistake. It’s actually one of the most important parts of the case you have to make, and you need to give it the attention it deserves. More than this, if the template doesn’t include a specific ‘discounting other factors’ section, you should find somewhere to do it elsewhere.

The Catholic Church once employed canon lawyers, known as devil’s advocates, whose role it was to dig up inconvenient truths to test the strength of any case for a candidate for sainthood. The role was abolished in 1983 by John Paul II. But if you want to win in the awards game, you need to bring some of that sceptical spirit to your own work.

So here’s the trade secret. First write your paper. Tell your story. Then do whatever you can to undermine everything you’ve just said. Then rebuild. Then, and only then, will you be in the best position to be a winner.

[1]Alexander Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain, OUP 1967

[2] About The Size Of It, Warwick Cairns, www.panmacmillan.com

[3]Giving short shrift to the recipe for a long life, Emma Duncan, 26 December 2024,

[4) UCL demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans wins Ig Nobel prize, 13 September 2024, www.ucl.ac.uk