Hi everyone,

I submitted an article to a peer-reviewed (humanities) journal yesterday and, as is normal, confirmed that I hadn't and wouldn't submit it anywhere else for consideration.

Today, I received an alert about a graduate student essay prize for which the deadline is in a month. With some student essay prizes, they say "the winning paper may be considered for publication in our journal". However, I can't see any evidence of that here even though the prize-givers do run a journal. There's not much information actually other than a word limit. It doesn't even say the paper has to be unpublished but I assume it should be.

I figure I could ask both the journal and the people running the prize whether it's okay but I don't want to annoy anyone if it's a definite no-no...

What do you forumites think?

Before anyone replies...

My husband convinced me to email the journal and the essay contest people, checking with both. Editor says its fine as long as the paper won't be circulated beyond the selection committee, and the committee chair has assured me that this is indeed the case. Everyone was very nice about it so I don't think I offended anyone!

Great! Good luck! :-)

Thanks! :)

Hopefully you'll be able to go ahead with both. A bit of advice if you do get to enter the competition - do consider editing/redrafting for the prize if there are any particular requirements. I've reviewed essays entered for prizes before and it's very annoying if the entrant has disregarded the requirements.

The worse case of this I had is where someone had deleted spaces between words in order to scrape the word count, rather than just editing it down! As I'm not an idiot, I did notice! And penalised accordingly....

That's hilarious/tragic. How on earth did they think they'd get away with that??

Either way, thank you for the tip! They haven't really listed any guidelines apart from word count which is good and bad I suppose. I like guidelines because they give you something to work towards but it also means I don't have to do much editing (I think).

OhMyGoodnessHazyJaneIHopeTheyDidn'tGetSecondPrize! Or_were_they_slightly_more_clever_about_it?