By Ashley Duncan– Writing a poem, a textbook, a novel, a research paper, or even a thesis paper, is something to be proud of. Writing is writing and Writing Day aims to celebrate it all.
Writing Day started almost 35 years ago at Morningside as a new event to showcase everything that not only students have written, but also alumni and other people in the community. Dr. Elizabeth Coody said, “It was put together as kind of a writing across the disciplines initiative.”
Dr. Coody is the Writing Day coordinator, who oversees the committee. The committee consists of students, faculty, and staff because all events that happen about writing; everybody on campus should get a say. “Students are just as a big of voice on the committee as everybody else,” said Dr. Coody.
This committee plans events to celebrate writing accomplishments. Just recently at the end of November there was an event held to celebrate National Writing month. Basically, anybody could participate to sit down and try to at least write 10,000 words or less or more, in one day. By the end of November, they hopefully should have written at least 50,000 words.
The group that met for this event had very different ranges of goals they made. One student said she had written 90,000 words! To classify a story as a novel a person must write between 80,000 and 100,000 words, therefore, this student wrote a novel within a month.
Juliana Baker, another student that showed up to the event said, “I like the control [of writing], you get to control the whole aspect of the world, the characters. It’s all you.” She didn’t quite make the 50,000-word goal, but she still got herself writing and that’s what Writing Day aims to do.
In past years, Writing Day used to be every day on Friday at noon because of scheduling reasons there was nothing going on at that specific time. However, having events every Friday made it hard for participation. Therefore, they decided to change it and hold events once a month. “Take the Friday off because it was no longer an open spot and we wanted to have the flexibility to move around all week,” said Dr. Coody.
In February the committee plans to celebrate National Heart month, showcasing the writings accomplished in the medical field. More in the spring they plan to celebrate the literary magazine, The Kiosk, and bring in a few other writers.
As Dr. Coody said, “If you are writing, that’s all that matters. People in science write just as much as people in humanities.” Make sure to look for the little splat logo that says, “Writing Day,” to find future events.
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