 Most desirable are clues that are clean but deceptive, with a smooth "surface reading" (that is, the resulting clue looks as natural a phrase as possible).The Usenet newsgroup "rec.puzzles.crosswords" has a number of clueing competitions where contestants all submit clues for the same word and a judge picks the best one.In principle, each cryptic clue is usually sufficient to define its answer uniquely, so it should be possible to answer each clue without use of the grid.