h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How about a competition/challenge (not sure it would really work as a competition) for touch-typists, where they can only use one hand? One round with right hand letters, and one round with left hand letters (opposite hand allowed for shift/return/punctuation). Somewhere, either at the top or bottom, the participant should identify keyboard layout--US, UK, Dvorak, etc. I think it could be interesting, even if I can't participate

Hate the first reply to be a negative one Amy, but I'm not sure how such a competition would work. Still, if you've got a more thorough skeleton idea then maybe I can be proven wrong.

What would be the point of such a competition?

I don't think we're looking for touch typists. Aren't we in the business of encouraging people to write interesting, or exciting, or funny articles, stories, poems?

Some of the possibilities that have occurred to me are:

flash fiction - write a story in 100 words;

backward stories - written from the end and continuing in reverse chronological order to the beginning;

a haiku competition - encapsulate a vivid image in three lines of: five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables.

Do you mean a creative writing contest, where you're only allowed to use half of the letters on the keyboard?

Sounds like a challenge!

minorvogonpoet: There's also - http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F2606954?thread=6506119&skip=0&show=20 BW Jab

Sorry I missed this, Jab.

I agree with Icy North that a story writing competition where you're only allowed to use a restricted selection of letters might be interesting! smiley>

(as long as it's not q,z,x,v and k)! <laugh)

I think the difficuly here would be that you can never proof that people are only using one hand. Here's a suggestion around Amy's original idea:You have, say, five minutes to write as much as you can. You post a 'starting now' post as evidence of your start time and then write as much as you can in five minutes. I think it would need to be expanded upon and improve as this idea on it's own still sounds a little dull to me, but it might be the basis of something creative.

Icy--That's exactly what I meant--creative writing, with the form left to the author (so more of a challenge--though this *could* be an option for judges for the competition thingy, you know, the really great one that ran for a few months, with 3 judges, minorvogonpoet was a part for a while...)

benjamin--That's why the name of the keyboard layout would need to be at the top or bottom of the entry, so it could be checked, though it would mostly be an honor system.

Ah, lipograms! Could be fun...

Georges Perec wrote one 300 pages long without using the letter 'e' once. I bet he wanted to kill the printer who stamped his name on the front cover.

Now imagine having to translate that!

Oooh - challenging, yes. Someone did, though.

Then again, it shouldn't be that hard. If you pick Mandarin or Arabic to translate it into, anyway.

The Stretcher! I could think of everything but the name of the actual competition this morning

Amy - there's a very similar thread already (the link is in Post 5 ). We've had nearly 600 entries so far. Write a story that's five sentences or less long. Why don't you join us?

BW,

Jabs