In the Hut 8 Search Captions tool you can now see how contestants used punctuation. We all know how helpful it is to study winning caption structure.
Reviewing historical data also helps fact-check. I hear things and often think: hmm… that doesn’t sound right. So, if you have an accurate, verifiable, and large enough dataset; it’s worth a check.
e.g., Heard that bangs are rarely used? Search bang. Currently, about 4.25% of the captions have a bang. That’s more than I expected and I was pleasantly surprised with Contests #409, #392, and #147 — all captions used a bang!
The captions that use ! are rather on the interesting side, so maybe that’s what determines whether or not to use a bang. Some bang captions also have another word in the caption underlined. (Or…maybe TNY did a good ole edit?)
And another plus for the bang-captions (or just trivia) found in the Hut 8 Word Economy tool: a bang caption is the shortest one-word WINNER caption. That’s pretty cool. Second place shortest caption ties the length, but no bang.
Neophyte Captioneer
I used a bang in my first ever entry in TNYCCC for Contest #742. It did so poorly in crowdsourced data, I forgot about the Contest and gave up.
Then, seventy-four Contests later, I tried again—and deservedly was ranked even worse. See image below. Spoiler alert: I was ranked 4,306 out of 6,228. Just to torture myself: 69.139% percentile.
I used an ellipsis, long before I knew em dashes were so ubiquitous in captions. Note: an em dash wouldn’t have saved this caption.
Review Caption Structure
- Research multi-sentence caption structure. Search a period. Note: I don’t include single-sentence captions ending with a period.
- Semi-colons. How were they used vs an em dash? (Note, if you search for em dashes, make sure you type in the em dash and not a hyphen.)
- Colons in captions are interesting. I’m always hesitant because I feel like it doesn’t read like natural language.
And, if there wasn’t a JFF in all this why do it? Search for an ellipsis. The results return a caption, based on structure, I wouldn’t have thought would work. But, then again, as they say: “kudos” to the contestant for entering it. The caption does look funny and did become a Finalist.
Go ahead and search for your favorite funny word in the Hut 8 Search Captions tool.