Writing Contest
As in previous years, the One Book. . . One Campus ... One Community Reading Initiative Committee will be sponsoring a writing contest, with this year’s The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh.
This year, in order to attract more submissions, to broaden the written discussion of the book, and to facilitate conversations about writing across departments and disciplines, we would like to develop a campus-wide program that will offer a number of activities and opportunities for sharing and getting feedback on writing.
This program will involve sharing assignments that are being made in classes in which the book is assigned reading, and encouraging students and faculty to work on developing and revising work done in class for inclusion in events in the Spring of 2021, in an online publication, and for the contest.
The Writing Center will be especially prepared to work with student writing on the book. Watch for announcements of events and activities in connection with the book discussions, film screenings, and speakers that will be scheduled.
We will be offering prizes for writing in different categories:
- Academic and Scholarly Writing
- Fiction and Poetry
- Creative Nonfiction
Over the course of this semester and next, we will be providing further information of guidelines and criteria, but submissions should begin with a substantial engagement with the text of The Great Derangement. The writing should grow out of and reflect a close and careful reading of Ghosh’s book, giving extensive attention to its arguments, examples, illustrations and implications.
To provide a general sense of the criteria and expectations for the contest, we provide the IU Northwest general education outcomes for writing:
Students at Indiana University Northwest will:
- Read actively and critically, analyzing and evaluating a writer’s ideas and assumptions, use of illustrations, examples and evidence, and the effectiveness of the structure and style of challenging written texts.
- Analyze and evaluate the relationship between a writer’s central purpose in a text and the rhetorical means—ethical, emotional, and logical—used to advance that purpose.
- Use the writing process as a tool of inquiry to discover, explore, test, and develop ideas.
- Draft and revise written texts that provide readers with effectively organized and clearly integrated support—in the form of illustrations and examples, relevant and sufficient data, and other pertinent sources of information and ideas—of a well-formulated thesis.
- Incorporate the words and ideas of others correctly and effectively, as support of the text’s thesis.
- Edit written texts for clarity and appropriateness of style, precision of language, and correctness in grammar and punctuation, and adhere to the expectations of an appropriate documentation style.
If you are a student in a class in which the book is being read, we encourage you to consider developing the writing that you do in class both for presentation at the student conferences and for submission to the contest and for inclusion in readings and publications.
If you are not enrolled in a class that is working with the book, watch for further announcements on how you can find opportunities for writing and getting feedback on your writing. If you are a faculty member, encourage students to pursue their writing beyond the class and offer to provide further feedback and suggestions.
Submissions will be due by March 1, 2021.
For more information, contact Doug Swartz (dswartz@iun.edu) or Crystal Shannon (crshanno@iun.edu)
