The day is here! After much reading and reviewing, we’ve determined the finalists in our University Writing Competition. We had some pretty impressive entries, and we believe our final group highlights the best examples of science writing we received. The finalists ended up being a good cross-section of subjects, science disciplines, and participating universities. All are all well written, informative - and often times, entertaining. We think you’ll agree.

Some entries were outstanding because of their scientific subject matter; others because of the writing skill they represented; and others for their informative and persuasive content. But we believe the chosen finalists represent the best balance of all of these factors - and all of them represent potential blogs we would enjoy reading on an ongoing basis.

Now it’s the readers turn to tell us who their favorites are. The red CONTEST tab now lists all of our finalists. If you wish to vote for an article, click on the article of your choice, and then click the “VOTE” widget that comes up with that article. You can vote for an article only once per day, but you may vote for more than one article each day if you have several favorites. And be sure to come back the next day to vote again if you want to help your favorite finalists win.

Individuals do NOT need to be registered members of Scientific Blogging in order to vote. However, voting will close at Midnight Pacific Time on Sunday, November 22nd. So get your votes in while you can, and then stay tuned for the announcement of our winners on December 1st.

The finalist that received the greatest number of votes during the voting period will be our Grand Prize winner, and will receive a $2,500 cash prize - as well as a 3-month writing internship at ScientificBlogging.com. Because we did not have enough finalists to round out individual finalist groups in each science discipline, we will instead be awarding a Second Prize of $1,000 cash and a Third Prize of $500 cash to the articles receiving the second and third most votes respectively, across all disciplines. Awards will be given based on final voting totals, regardless of the science discipline represented.

So if you are one of our finalists – Congratulations! Great work and we hope to hear more from you regardless of the competition results. But by all means, get the word out to friends, family, peers, teachers, and co-workers, Twitter buds, Facebook friends, and complete strangers - that you’re one of our finalists and that you need their votes.

And to the rest of our readers, get your votes in. The winners are all up to you!