National Day on Writing spurs creativity at COW
Modern writing has taken many forms. It’s not limited to poetry, stories, newspapers or essays; nor does it require endless creativity. Surprisingly enough, it’s not something anyone has to suffer through—it’s more about communication and individual expression of language. In today’s world there is now texting, Tweeting, blogging, and posting updates on Facebook. And all of these forms of the written word were celebrated on Tuesday, Oct. 20, the National Day on Writing, designated as such by the National Council on Teachers of English (NCTE).So it really comes as no surprise that the College of Wooster conjured up a unique way to celebrate the event. After all, the school is known for exquisite writing—in fact, each student must write a 100-page Independent Study thesis. But secondly, the school has an impressive range of diversity of cultures, so combining the two made for an interesting week.
“Writing is a verb and a noun. It’s the product and the process. It’s somebody’s name in another language and it’s Shakespeare, it’s all of it. And it should be accessible to everybody,” explained Jenny Derksen, writing center consultant at the College of Wooster. Alongside Joanne Lehman, who is a second consultant to the writing center, a very unique celebration was developed.
During the week of Oct. 20, students, faculty, staff and community members alike had the opportunity to visit Lowry Center where one of the walls was posted with blank sheets of large paper. Prompts decorated the paper, encouraging people to post their name in a different language, post a joke, a quote from a movie, a song lyric, or post virtually any other form of writing. Even those that weren’t actively participating seemed to enjoy eyeing the posts as they walked to their classes.
“I realize that there are people that don’t read and write in the world and in the United States. And I realize that people are hindered by that. And I think that a lot of people see writing as an academic thing…but it’s not, it’s really not. It’s something we all do every day,” continued Derksen. “And it’s not private—writing is definitely not something you do huddled up in your room.”
And since the event was a reminder of how broad writing truly is, the students were encouraged to be as creative, or as uncreative as they wanted to be. It was all about inclusion, and they were given the whole week to develop their ideas, so no one was pressured to come up with something on the spot. However, stepping out of comfort zones was definitely a by-product of the event. Participants posted classical poems or dances in Spanish, lines from movies, and their names in other languages, and appeared quite proud to do so.
“And that was the other thing, I wanted everybody to participate in whatever way they could,” Derksen said. “There was a woman here from Germany and she does not really read or write English. For her to learn English to be able to write would be very difficult, so she wrote in German. Another woman, who’s only been in the United States for a couple of months, wrote what her name means in Chinese. We’re very lucky here because down the road is the Adult Basic Literacy Education Program (ABLE). So we’ve invited them to come over.”
Another opportunity was for anyone to post their literacy stories by video on a digital archive through The Ohio State University. Secondly, the National Gallery of Writing, which is a Web site that allows people to post their writings for the public to see, was unveiled on Oct. 20, and anyone was welcome to post their unique form of writing. If interested, writers can visit www.galleryofwriting.org/con tribute.php.