How You Can
Participate
- Consider NCoW assignments for your writing classes, or other relevant courses, such as literature, sociology, psychology, education, history, etc.
- Recruit local school teachers to consider NCoW assignments for themselves or their students
- Have students (or other groups?) write something about how writing has affected their life, about a writing teacher that inspired them, a literacy experience, etc.
- Have students conduct interviews with peers to learn about writing outside of school
- Have students conduct interviews of family, perhaps even a generational oral history that focuses on writing
- Have students interview individuals from the community
- Consider interviews of employers to learn about how writing is used on the job, or interview people in local organizations to explore the roles of writing
- Consider a project similar to "This I believe" or "This American Life," audio or text, that focuses on writing—how it is learned and used
- Talk
with us: We’d be very interested in hearing about
your experiences with writing. If
you’d be willing, this is in some ways the most important thing you can do
to help. The conversations will be
informal, and will just give you the chance to help us create a
well-rounded picture of how, why, and when people write—and why they find
it useful, therapeutic, difficult, inspiring, and so on . . . .
- Create
a video: If you’d like to join
in the conversation in another way, you can send us your videos of conversations
about writing. It doesn’t require
lots of expertise or equipment, and many of us have enlisted the help of
communications students and faculty who have special expertise in these
technologies Some suggestions to
get you started are included below—but feel free to be creative.
- Audio
Tape interviews or writers reading from their writing. One of the misconceptions about writing is that people are writing
less than they used to. But that is
only true if we use a very narrow understanding of writing. A good way to overcome this shortsighted
understanding of the state of writing is through examples. So, interview people from all walks of
life about how writing enhances their life, their work, or their
relationships. Encourage them to
think about the composing they do in many modes—electronic and visual as
well as text-based. Or, you might
ask people to read from their work. Both interviews and readings can be collected using widely
available and inexpensive digital audio recorders that create easily
distributed sound files.
- Collect
written examples of people reflecting on the writing, in all its forms,
they do in their our daily lives. We’ll provide a forum for showcasing these
reflections, showing how omnipresent the art of writing remains.
- Sponsor
local writing initiatives, and then tell us about them. Consider developing a writing festival, workshop, discussion group
or reading in your area, and document that event in writing, through news
coverage of the event, or by video or audio taping. NCoW will provide a central location to
showcase these events. We envision
videos or still photographs of the events posted to our site, PDF files of
news stories, and narratives about the events.
- Sponsor
a writing contest, and let us help us publicize it. Writing contests can provide initiatives for writing of all sorts,
so don’t limit yourself to “creative writing” (what writing isn’t
creative, after all?). Think about
essay contests, letter writing contests (including letters to the editors),
editorial and political writings, literacy narratives (in which people
talk about their own experiences learning to write), etc.
- Share
innovative writing projects with other teachers. We’ll provide a space for teachers to exchange
ideas about innovative assignments and methods.
- Be
Creative. The above are just
some examples. Come up with more on
your own and tell us about them!
For more Information or advice, contact
us
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