The days are growing crisper and with them the leaves are beginning to turn to gold and red and crunch underfoot. The smell of autumn is all around us and the chill of early day has students breaking out their favorite sweaters. College students scurry about, burrowing in their dorms with their textbooks to prepare for their midterm exams and the math learning center is bustling with panicked studiers from college algebra all the way to advanced calculus.
But as the student body’s attention turns from homework and midterms to pumpkins and Halloween, another learning center sets its sights on a different event. Coming up this month on Oct. 20 is the Eighth Annual National Writing Day. Each year on Oct. 20, people all across the country celebrate writing. A quick peek at the webpage for the National Council of Teachers of English, the organization that founded this national celebration, reveals more information on what this holiday is all about. Most notably, all over Twitter people use the hashtag #WhyIWrite to describe their reasons for writing, reaching the average citizen all the way up to celebrities from all fields. This year the Multiliteracies Center will be reaching out to students across the Michigan Tech campus and hosting special events on this day.
One of the major highlights of this celebration will be a multimodal competition, including a photo and written competition centering on the theme #whyMTUwrites. The winners will have the opportunity to be featured on the MTMC website and their Facebook page. If competitions aren’t your style, there are plenty of things that participants can drop in and do. There will be an ongoing post-it note plot-line all day where people can stop by and leave their own personal addition to the plot. There will also be a poetry slam where people can bring in just about anything from real poems to academic reports and read it to an audience like it’s poetry.
Finally, there will be Poem in Your Pocket stations around campus, namely the MTMC, Library and Bookstore, where there will be baskets of short poems for people to keep and read, like a little token of this celebration. For more information on past celebrations of the National Day on Writing and on a more country-wide scale, visit the website: http://www.ncte.org/dayonwriting.
Ever since I was little, I wrote to be heard, to get my voice out there and let people know what I’m thinking. You can be heard, too. Why do you write? Email me at alipzins@ mtu.edu about your reasons for writing and we’ll publish it in the What’s Hot column in next week’s edition of the Lode.
