This past Tuesday, Wooster students and faculty kicked off a four-day celebration in honor of the National Day on Writing. Receiving approval earlier this month by the US Senate, the National Council on Teachers of English (NCTE) has designated Oct. 20 as a day in which all Americans come together to celebrate the role writing has in each of our lives.
The activities scheduled throughout the week were meant to unite contributors through the written word, by asking them to participate in various activities that centered on creative writing.
Organizer and College Writing Consultant Joanne Lehman was most excited about the ìLit” prompts that were used to inspire students to ìrespond to the literature that is part of our lives.”
In these prompts, students were asked to share favorite lines from songs and movies, as well as jokes, haiku poems, limericks, riddles and comments on various other topics.
Students filled large Post-Its with their responses, which were then posted on the ìThe Wall” in Lowry Center. According to Lehman, the Lowry wall was meant to be transformed into ìour own College of Wooster Gallery of Writing.”
Fellow organizer, Writing Consultant and ESL coordinator for Wayne County ABLE, Jenny Derksen, was equally excited about the collegeís collaboration with the Center for Diversity and Global Engagement. Peer tutors and students from this organization were on hand to help students write their names in different languages.
Group participation was also strongly encouraged for such exercises as ìthe Exquisite Corpse,” where each person was asked to write a different line of a poem, eventually resulting in an interesting poem or prose piece.
Some contributors even opted to construct acrostic poems, which were written using the letters from oneís first name.
Participants were invited to share a ìdigital narrative” about their personal reading and writing experiences. Each individual was given the chance to tell his or her ìliteracy story” on film, and then download it onto the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, hosted by The Ohio State University.
Another option was for participants to publish written words about their experiences with reading and writing, which could then be posted on the National Gallery, a site sponsored by the NCTE.
Contributors were also strongly encouraged to document the different events through photos, which could then be posted on the College of Wooster National Gallery page.
The importance of this event is immediately clear to anyone who is a past or present student, faculty member, or even just familiar with the goals of the College. As an institution that has always taken great pride in their focus on writing, be it intellectual or creative, it is no wonder that the College was eager to participate in an event like the National Day on Writing.
As Derksen points out, ìThe College is a campus which takes writing seriously. Itís part of [our] mission as a school.”
Lehman goes on to say that, ìItís important to us who are involved in the Collegeís Program In Writing to be part of the larger efforts on the part of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and Ohio State Universityís Digital Archives of Literary Narratives. By encouraging our students to share their writing in these two online collections, we can help them tell their stories about reading, writing and teaching with many others.”
Both Derksen and Lehman agreed that the main goals of this event were to simply ìhave fun, enjoy writing,” and to, ìhave fun reading the wall and responding to each other.”
With these goals in mind, students, faculty, staff and the outside community all came together to share their best work. Their united effort further demonstrated just how integral written communication is to the world at large. It also can serve as a medium that bonds us all.