Thank you for your submission!

Dear Alison,

Thank you so much for your submission to _____ Journal/Literary Magazine/Review! We received so many entries this year and unfortunately, only one winner could be selected.

Needless to say (you already knew from reading that intro!) your submission has not been accepted for publication. We appreciate your time and effort and entry, and enormously hope we do not have to read anything resembling your writing in the future! And that includes all writing contests we sponsor!

Thank you, and have a nice day (after waiting to hear back from us for four months!),

_________, Editor/Reader/___ name of journal/literary magazine/review

PS, in case you were wondering who won:

_____ earned their MFA at Harvard University. Or Yale, or Brown! They are published in fifty-two literary journals, twenty-six literary magazines, and twenty times and thirty times in the The New Yorker and The Atlantic, respectively. They are also, somehow, an incredibly talented artist and cartoonist, and their art has appeared in the Guggenheim as well as The New Yorker, where their caption for a recent comic strip earned them a senior position on the editorial board. Don't know what that is? Neither do we! It sounds impressive so keep reading! This writer also appeared in Cosmopolitan, but for their fashion sense, the style of which has gone on to be renamed in their name. Oh, but there's more! This writer went to (insert Ivy League University) for their undergraduate degree, and now resides as a writer-in-residence at that university! Is there more? Yes! This writer is known for their quirky quips, and has been featured in The New York Times Sunday edition!

Alison, you're probably wondering, at this point - how did I not win this writing contest? But really, it's ok! You tried, and that's what matters!

We wish you the best of luck (do we?) on all your future writing endeavors!

Here's another excuse to use an exclamation point!

Yours most sincerely (this time for realz),

The aforementioned editors