Answering the Question Asked

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Past the administrative check, the most common failure is answering a different question from the one asked — and it happens to people who know their work well, for reasons that are structural rather than careless.

Why it happens

Because you know what is interesting about your work and the form does not ask about it.

A criterion asks about measured impact. What you want to describe is the difficulty of the period, the ingenuity of the solution, the people involved. All genuinely interesting and none of it what is being scored. A broader reference point is Medium.

The entry drifts toward the material you have rather than the material requested, and the drift is invisible from inside.

The four ways

One. Answering about activity where impact was asked. "We ran forty workshops" describes what you did. "Attendance in the following quarter rose from X to Y" describes what changed. Impact means change in somebody else, measured.

Two. Answering about intention where results were asked. What you set out to do, and why it mattered, in place of what happened.

Three. Answering about the organisation where the project was asked. History, values and structure filling a section about a specific piece of work.

Four. Answering a bigger question than was asked. A criterion about one aspect answered with everything, on the assumption that more is safer. It is not — a judge scoring one criterion has to find the relevant part, and the surrounding material makes that harder.

The check

Read each answer with the criterion beside it and ask: does the first sentence answer this?

Not the paragraph. The first sentence.

Where it does not, the answer either needs reordering or is about something else — and both are visible in seconds once you look for it specifically.

Then ask what a judge would score. If you cannot point at the words earning the points, neither can they.

The reordering that fixes most of it

Answer first, evidence second, context third.

Most entries are written in the opposite order — context, then explanation, then the answer at the end — because that is how people explain things in conversation.

Conversation has an attentive listener. A judge reading forty entries does not read to the end of every paragraph.

Moving the answer to the front costs nothing and is the single highest-return edit available.

The question behind the question

Occasionally worth considering, and only after the literal question is answered.

A criterion asking about innovation is usually asking what you do differently from others and why it worked — not for a claim to novelty.

One asking about sustainability may be asking whether the thing survives without the funding, rather than about environmental practice.

Where the intent is unclear, ask the organiser rather than guessing, and answer the literal question in any case.

The section that has no obvious answer

Every entry has one, and how it is handled separates careful entrants from hopeful ones.

Do not fill it with the nearest available material, which is transparent and wastes words that could support a criterion you can answer.

Say what you have and what you do not. "We measure X but not Y. Here is what X shows." A judge scores what is there and reads the honesty as judgement rather than weakness.

And note it for next year. A criterion you could not answer is a thing to start measuring, which makes the second entry substantially stronger.

Word limits as guidance about scope

A hundred-word answer and an eight-hundred-word answer to superficially similar questions are asking for different things.

The short one wants the fact. The long one wants the fact, the evidence, the context and the consequence.

Filling a hundred-word box with context leaves no room for the answer, which is how a short section gets failed by somebody with plenty to say.

Write the answer first and expand into the space, rather than writing to length and hoping the answer is in there.

Reusing an answer across programmes

Tempting and it is where this failure most often originates.

An answer written for one criterion, pasted into a superficially similar one elsewhere, answers the first question in the second paper.

Reuse the evidence, rewrite the answer. The figures, quotes and documents transfer; the sentence that opens the answer has to be aimed at the criterion in front of it, and rewriting it takes minutes.

Reading it aloud

The last check before submitting, and it catches what silent reading does not.

A sentence you stumble over is a sentence a judge re-reads, and re-reading costs attention that was going to the next criterion.

Long qualifying clauses, nested conditions and three-line sentences all sound worse than they look, which is exactly why the test works.

Ten minutes for a whole entry, and it finds more than a fourth silent pass.

Having somebody else check it

Give a reader the criteria and the answers separately and ask which answer belongs to which criterion.

Where they cannot match them, neither can a judge — and the mismatch is invisible to whoever wrote it.

Ten minutes of somebody else's time, and it is the most useful thing a second reader does.

The short version

• The commonest substantive failure is answering a different question, and it happens because your best material is not what was asked for
• Four ways: activity instead of impact, intention instead of results, the organisation instead of the project, and everything instead of the specific
• The check: does the first sentence of each answer address the criterion beside it
• Answer first, evidence second, context third — most entries use the opposite order because that is how conversation works
• A judge reading forty entries does not read to the end of every paragraph, which makes the reordering the highest-return edit
• Consider the intent behind a criterion only after the literal question has been answered