Write Your Award Entry For A Judge Who Has No Time
By Gabriel Tan | June 2026
I judged this year's International Business Awards, in artificial intelligence (AI), technology and sustainability. Across the entries, the same line kept separating the winners from the rest. This is the second of three posts on where that line falls, drawn from what I actually scored. The first post was about proof. This one is about how you write it down.
You spent three weeks on this entry. Every figure checked, every line worked over, the supporting files named and in order. You are proud of it, and you should be.
The judge gives the first pass a couple of minutes. By the time your entry comes up, they are partway through the stack for that sitting, and they are deciding one thing. Is this worth reading closely, or not.
Reading ten or twenty entries in a sitting changes how anything lands. The ones that get full attention are not always the best products. They are the ones written for a reader who is short of time and has no patience for being made to work.
You cannot change how the judge reads. You can change how your entry meets them. Three habits do most of the work. Enter the category your evidence fits. Open with the proof, not the preamble. And make the written entry carry your whole case on its own.
The right category is half the score
Before you write a single line, read the criteria for the category you are entering. Read them twice. They tell you exactly what the judge scores, and they often weight outcomes far above description. Most entries are written as though the criteria were never opened.
The bigger mistake is the category itself. I scored an entry once that made a strong case for financial inclusion. Real reach, a clear social story, work worth recognising. It was entered under sustainability. On the sustainability criteria it had almost nothing to say, so it lost on fit before the quality of the work was ever weighed.
Map your evidence against the criteria first. If your strongest material answers a different category's questions, enter that category instead. A strong entry in the wrong place loses to a weaker entry in the right one, every time. Choosing where you compete is part of the work, not a box you tick at the end.
Open with the proof, not the preamble
By the time the judge reaches your entry, they have read several others in the same sitting. They are working at pace, and your first lines decide whether they lean in or skim the rest.
Most entries open by clearing their throat. Company history. Mission language. A paragraph on the size of the market. The result, the one thing that would make a judge sit up, turns up in paragraph six.
By paragraph six the judge has already formed a view. Put your strongest proof in the first two sentences. Not the background to it, the proof itself. If your best line is a measured outcome set against a benchmark, that is your opening, and the context earns its place underneath.
You are not building suspense. You are giving a working reader a reason to keep going. Once they have that reason, they will read the history, the method, the careful detail. Earn the second paragraph with the first.
The written entry has to stand on its own
A judge working through a stack has limited patience for work. If a sentence makes them read it twice to find your meaning, you have spent goodwill you do not get back. One entry I read ran three paragraphs of platform language before I could say what the product actually did for anyone. The words were polished and empty. If you cannot explain the thing in plain words, a judge assumes you cannot do it in plain terms either.
The submission form lets you add attachments. Use them for backup, not for your case. A judge who has to download a file to find your proof often will not open it, and your best evidence sits unread. A video does the same thing in another form. I would rather read a submission than watch one, and I think most judges still lean that way, though some prefer video. Either way, do not make your argument depend on a file the judge has to open. Put the whole case in the written entry, and treat anything outside it as something the judge may never reach.
The word limit is the last trap. It is a ceiling, not a target. Say what you did, prove it, and stop. An entry that makes its case in two thirds of the limit reads as sure of itself. One that fills every box reads as nervous, hoping volume covers for proof.
What to do before you submit
Three steps, before you write the entry, not after.
Read the criteria for your category and write down what each line scores. Lay your evidence beside it. If your strongest evidence fits a different category, move. Thirty minutes.
Write your opening sentence last. Once you know your single best piece of proof, make it the first thing the judge reads. Fifteen minutes.
Read the finished entry aloud, as if the attachments do not exist. Cut any line you stumble over. If the written entry alone does not make your case, fix that before anything else, then stop when the case is made, even under the limit. Twenty-five minutes.
The judge who is still paying attention
Picture the judge again, several entries into the sitting, reaching for the next one. Most of what they have read asked them to work. To decode the language, to dig for the result, to open a file to find the proof, to sit through a category the entry did not fit.
Yours does not. It opens with the proof, in the right category, in words they read once, with nothing parked in an attachment they have to chase. They reach the end still paying attention, and they score you on what you did, not on how hard you made them look for it.
That is the whole craft. Your work was always going to be judged. Write so it gets the chance to be.
Gabriel Tan is the founder of Mekong Bridge Advisory. He builds structured execution systems for PR and communications firms.
