Life In The USA
$1000 Essay Contest

• www.lifeintheusa.com welcomes new articles, but send in your ideas first.

• Please read the Essay Contributor Guidelines and Benefits page carefully.

• Articles chosen for inclusion in www.lifeintheusa.com will automatically be entered in the contest.

• Participation is limited to those articles we actually choose for inclusion.

• Contest begins September 1, 2007. Contest will end June 30, 2008.

• Articles published on www.lifeintheusa.com will be judged by an independent panel. All decisions of the panel will be final.

The www.lifeintheusa.com $1000 Essay Contest is designed to help www.lifeintheusa.com grow and serve immigrants and American students wishing to know more about American life.

Please read the full www.lifeintheusa.com site carefully. You will see that we already accept essays and articles of about 500 words on new topics, or new essays that will replace topic sections that might be outdated or very short.

Articles on www.lifeintheusa.com give excellent exposure to writers. We also feature contributors, with their consent and at our option, on the Life In The USA Magazine page, preferably with a photograph. The site offers no additional payment to contributors.

All articles accepted for publication in www.lifeintheusa.com within the contest dates will automatically be entered into the contest. There is no limit to the number of articles from any one author, provided each is first individually accepted by www.lifeintheusa.com for publication on the site.

Articles may be written by two or more writers, but must be submitted by one individual who will indicate how authorship should be attributed and how the prize, if awarded, should be divided. Prizes may be allocated to charities if desired.

At the close of the contest, an independent panel of judges will choose the best articles based on quality of writing and relevance to an understanding of American life. A first prize of $500 will be awarded, plus five $100 second place prizes. Individual writers may win at most a single prize, the highest for which they are chosen by the panel.

The contest will apply to all essays we accept and publish beginning September 1, 2007. The contest will end on June 30, 2008. www.lifeintheusa.com expects to announce contest results and award the prizes within six weeks of the contest ending date. The winners will then be profiled on the www.lifeintheusa.com site and the site's international news feed.

The guidelines for having an article accepted as a www.lifeintheusa.com section, during the contest period or after, are spelled out on the www.lifeintheusa.com Essay Contributor Guidelines and Benefits page. In addition to guidelines, this page gives many subject ideas, and spells out the important benefits all published contributors receive, immediately, whether you win the contest or not.

Some important points:

• The first step, get in touch with us and suggest an idea, giving your credentials if relevant. Do not send in a completed article unless and until we express interest, even if you already have one written.

• We reserve the right not to publish any article sent in, even after we have expressed interest, if we feel it is not on topic or poorly written. We also reserve the right to edit articles for language, appropriateness, and size.

• All articles must be original. They must be written in the third person and strive to be as useful and objective as possible, in line with a reference work. If they treat a social issue where opinions differ, they must mention both points of view.

• Articles should be submitted in Word if possible, or as direct text in an email, without html formatting and with no hyperlinks. All articles we publish from contributors acknowledge the author. If you have a website or blog you wish to publicize, as long as it is relevant and responsible, we will link to you from the article byline. See examples of previously published articles linked on the Essay Contributor Guidelines and Benefits page.

• www.lifeintheusa.com publishes guest articles on a one-time use basis. Contributors are free to submit their material to other publications, but give www.lifeintheusa.com the right to include the material on the www.lifeintheusa.com site. If requested by the author, www.lifeintheusa.com will remove an article within a reasonable period of time. www.lifeintheusa.com conversely reserves the right to remove any article, for any reason, without notice.

• Please bear in mind that levels of clicks or traffic to individual pages, or links to these pages, will have no bearing on the choice of the contest winners, since an independent panel will be choosing the winners. That said, www.lifeintheusa.com appreciates help in spreading the word. To that end the home page includes links to facilitate bookmarking the site to sites such as digg, del.icio.us, facebook and more, which we hope contributors will use responsibly.

• Once more, please read the Essay Contributor Guidelines and Benefits page very carefully, and familiarize yourself with the entire www.lifeintheusa.com site.
  

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