This week both in-person and online events celebrating the fifth annual National Day on Writing. GRAPHIC CREDIT: Elizabeth Wong
The National Day on Writing was celebrated at the University of Rhode Island with events such as bracelet and collage making, as well as a social media conversation about language justice.
This year marks the fifth annual celebration of the National Day on Writing (NDOW) at URI. The event, held from Oct. 18-22 and hosted by Writing Across URI, First-Year Writing, the Writing Center and the department of writing and rhetoric, will celebrate both in-person and online.
The week of celebration includes many celebrations centered around this year’s theme of linguistic justice, according to Stephanie West-Puckett, an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric and the director of First-Year Writing.
According to West-Puckett, in past years, the event has brought up to 200 students to participate in the day. Last year the celebration was entirely online, but this year the event will have a mix of online and in-person events.
“We’re really excited about the different options for participation this year,” West-Puckett said. “Getting some face-to-face opportunities back on the programming schedule and having the online folks to participate anytime, wherever they are.”
Students are encouraged to post on their TikTok and Instagram accounts, responding to prompts having to do with linguistic justice.
“I’m excited that students get to share the language diversity,” West-Puckett said. “There’s a great diversity of languages, dialects [and] accents at URI. So [we want to share] with both video recording and audio recordings how we sound, how we use language and then getting into those issues of equity and issues of justice, like language profiling.”
She said that many students are not familiar with language profiling, or assumptions made about a person based on their accent or dialect. She hopes this event will be an opportunity for students to explore this and other linguistic justice topics.
On Wednesday, Oct. 20 in-person events were held in two different writing spaces on campus, one being the Writing Production Lab which held events from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and the Writing Center who held events from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. All of the events were chosen because they revolved around the topic of linguistic justice.
Students were able to write on a graffiti board, responding to the prompt “tell us where you’re from without telling us where you’re from,” take The New York Times dialect quiz and create signs in the Production Lab. In the Writing Center, students played Taboo, made word association collages and created word bracelets. Students also got candy and NDOW merchandise.
“I’m especially excited that the Writing Center will host in-person events this year because we weren’t able to do that last year,” Heather Price, the coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center, said. “We have consultants that will be leading games and activities and they’re really excited. I think the face-to-face component and the joy of language and playing around with it are the most exciting, fun things about it.”
At the end of the week, there will be a drawing for the prizes students can win, including AirPods, a hard drive, four $50 Ram Cards, Lux pens and a high-tech journal, according to West-Puckett. Students can get raffle tickets for each event that they participated in throughout the week. The more events students took part in, the more chances they had to win these prizes.
This event is part of a larger national celebration of the National Day on Writing.
“This is something that is going on across the country,” Price said. “It’s not just about URI, this is on a national level and by participating on the actual day and through that week, we’re participating in a bigger conversation that’s happening all over the country, on an important subject, but also connecting to the greater world.”