The Gifted Education Programme may have produced top leaders, but it has nothing on the Straits Times Forum, a platform for some of our nation’s most brilliant minds.

For example, there is Ms Tan Lay Hoon who once expressed concern for the safety of other commuters after she saw someone sewing on a train, Mr Joe Teo Kok Seah who wanted to stem the rise of tattooing, and Ms Amy Loh Chee Seen who recently called for fried rice to be removed from cooked food stalls.

Of course, not every forum letter writer is equally successful at riling up typically apathetic netizens.

The truth is, getting published in the forum is hard enough, but I notice it takes a specific combination of banality, absurdity, and earnestness in a letter to also make it go viral. All within 400 words.

In other words, challenge accepted.

To see if I could count myself among the nation’s elite, I decided to put my theory to the test. For 14 consecutive days, I submitted one letter daily to the ST Forum.

With the help of two colleagues, I created new email accounts and pseudonyms for this experiment: Yang Wen Yi, Michelle Lee Wei Yit, and Jacob Lau Wei Jun.

My objectives were straightforward: first, get published; second, go viral.

More at https://www.domainofexperts.com/2018/05/heres-how-we-got-straits-times-forum-to.html