The phrase "a sort of contest" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe an event or situation that resembles a contest but may not fit the traditional definition of one.
Example: "The event was a sort of contest where participants showcased their skills in a friendly competition."
Alternatives: "a kind of competition" or "a type of challenge."
Onstage, she creates a sort of contest with the audience in which it is invited to sport with her.
A sort of contest has broken out among governments, as they pledge ever more aid Germany's is currently promising $674m, Japan's $500m, Australia's $380m (plus the same again in loans), America's $350m and Norway's $182m as well as relief-workers, soldiers, aircraft, food, medicines and more.
Dr. Varmus was the chief scientific adviser for the Grand Challenges in Global Health, a sort of contest in which Mr. Gates gave out $437 million to teams pursuing exotic goals like vaccines that can be inhaled or chemicals that can knock out mosquitoes' sense of smell.
Evenings are spent negotiating the newest aches and pains that have settled in by day's end, and what would normally be considered prime sleeping time has become a sort of contest with myself to see how many times I'll get up to pee in the night.
Neither does the average mark seem to consider, as he or she watches a shill appear to win game after game, how unlikely it would be for a human to set up any sort of contest on the sidewalk with a stake in cash and then be prepared to lose.
Anyone making a new high offer at this late stage would have to pay Mr Zell a break-fee of $25m, but that is a tiny sum as these things go, suggesting that the sellers are keen for the battle to continue.It counts as something of a surprise that there has been any sort of contest at all, given the fast-deteriorating economics of the newspaper industry.
Without the top-scorers Dwight Gayle (cup-tied) and Lee Tomlin (suspended), and with the Congolese central defender Gaby Zakuani away on international duty, Peterborough rarely threatened to make this game into any sort of contest.
In theory, it can set up a sort of beauty contest, forcing the parties towards a golden mean in the centre of politics.
"Star Academy" features 16 young Arab men and women in a sort of talent contest, singing, dancing and performing music and skits, as well as cooking, eating and sleeping.
We look to criticism not for truth but as a sort of gladiatorial contest, even a bullfight, with the reviewer in his suit of lights goading the poor creative animal.
He began by taking photographs for Racing Pigeon, a weekly founded in 1898 by his grandfather, whose obituary succinctly identified the work required as "winners in a sort of beauty contest for four-minute-miler pigeons".
