Writers Fortnight – Reflection

“Our student-writers rose to the challenge, producing authentic, responsible and powerful pieces”

 

For this year’s Writers Fortnight, the grade 9 and grade 10 FIB students, myself included, had the opportunity to create authentic feature articles and op-eds.

With this, we met several guest speakers, some being: collage artist and writer Graham Rawle, author and past USSR resident Sergey Grechishkin, and even students with inspiring stories from UWC. They each shared a purposeful part of their life and gave us powerful stories to write about in our articles, Sergey’s story being the one I chose.

With our topic of interest in mind, our teacher and head of the English department, Ms.Levy, taught us everything about the structure of an article. I learned the importance of the register and the way the writer narrates the story, and to even consider the smallest of things, like the paragraphing of a text to even the captions of an image. Each and everything builds upon one another to create the article.

Yet, I learned much more than just this.

When I started writing the article, I came across some troubles. I couldn’t seem to make the story as interesting or genuine as Sergey did. I began to realize that following the layout, although important, wasn’t what would make it a powerful and worthwhile article to read. Instead, it was finding the meanings of the story, and sharing what I found most captivating and inspiring with the readers. For Sergey, I enjoyed his story and even empathized with him. Although I have never had the experiences he has, like many who might read the article, I resonated with the idea of not having a fixed home and the struggles it may entail. Only with that in mind was when the article began to take its form.

Although I had written about one person, each speaker was so full of passion and drive. They told us of the risky decisions that they made, even when the people closest to them said it was inadvisable. They said it was for something they believed in and were truly passionate about, which was the main message I got from the speakers.

Overall, this experience taught me not only how to write an original article that is both powerful and inspirational, but also the reasons why I’d write one in the first place.

One Comment Add yours

  1. KL says:

    Lovely, Germaine…a worthy insight! And yes, you’ve got to the heart of the matter: the form only serves the content.

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