Competitions for Talented Kids

» joelmcintosh - "Competitions for Talented Kids," A Great Resource

I wanted to thank you for the review of Competitions for Talented Kids, one of the newest releases from my company, Prufrock Press (http://www.prufrock.com/). I agree with you that the book is a "great reference book" for talented students.

I did want to address a concern you had about the book. Listing the competitions alphabetically and then organizing a "Table of Contents" by competition type or "opportunities based on subject area" allowed us a great deal more flexibility than any other organizational scheme.

The trouble is that many of the competitions can be categorized under several competition types. For example, the Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition allows kids to submit both art and written fiction. As such, the competition is classified in the "Table of Contents" under both "Language Arts" and "Visual Arts." To double list the competition's complete description under both headings in the book would have almost doubled it's size. In fact, the original, first edition of this book used this organizational strategy and was almost 100 pages longer and included fewer competitions.

Because we were able to add more competitions and, at the same time, reduce the book's page count, this new edition is much less expensive than the original.

I hope I have helped explain our thinking in how we organized the new edition. Again, thank you for such a solid review of the book!

-- posted by joelmcintosh

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