In front of the Humanities Amphitheater on Tuesday afternoon, pages upon pages of scribbled writing hung from a clothesline. At the same time, a single row of orange construction paper stretched across the length of the Hodges Library second floor as students bent down to write on it. The National Day on Writing had taken over the epicenter of campus.
The National Council of Teachers of English established the day, and the U.S. Senate passed an Oct. 6 resolution deeming Oct. 20 the National Day on Writing, according to the council’s official Web site.
This all led to computer paper, scattered and eventually attached one on top of the other, dotted with pencil and marker, full of observations, confessions, hopes, quotes, religious odes, declarations of love and so on.
In Hodges Library, the long scroll of orange on the floor formed a complex whole with writing as universal as a “Fight Club” quote to as foreign as writing in different languages.
More than the content itself, the way words were written varied drastically. A quote from the indie band Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” song was scribed in large, broad letters, dominating its section of the paper. A quote from “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen was written in elegant cursive, while “I wish the Titans would win” was scrawled in angry, jagged lettering.
Micah Rickerson, junior in English and one of the overseers of the exercises, said he was surprised at how forthcoming people were when asked to write.
“It’s really a lot more personal than I’ve expected,” Rickerson said. “... Because a lot of this is anonymous, I think we’re getting what people really think.”
While some people adopted the PostSecret approach to the day, others were uncertain when asked.
“One of the biggest responses I’ve got, people are like, ‘I don’t know what to write,’” Rickerson said. “A lot of people have said they’re not creative, but it’s not about being creative. It’s about saying whatever you’re thinking.”
Cassie Maples, senior in English and another event worker, said that while some students were in a hurry from class to class, the turnout for the day was satisfactory.
“It’s actually been pretty positive as long as students aren’t going to class,” Maples said. “If they’re coming out of class, they’re pretty willing to write something, and we get really interesting responses.”
And it wasn’t just college students who participated. Faculty, a touring high school and even a kindergarten class joined the festivities. The kindergartners painted in Hodges while the event was getting set up, Rickerson said.
One goal of the day was to reach out to other students interested in writing, beyond majors like English, and Rickerson said using the centrally located Hodges Library as one of the venues accomplished this.
“We didn’t want to be just in Humanities where it’s just going to be like the sciences and humanities and stuff,” he said. “So here we really get engineering and business and everything, and this is really a high traffic area.”
Another goal of the day was to make students reevaluate their definition of writing, said Margaret Lazarus Dean, assistant professor in English and a member of the planning committee that organized the event.
“If you ask most people, ‘Do you write?’ or ‘Are you a writer?’ they don’t give an enthusiastic ‘yes,’ even though everyone writes, some of us quite a bit,” Dean said. “People tend not to give themselves credit for the writing they choose to do, like blogging and e-mail.”
She said she thinks students should reconsider their own abilities and recognize their everyday use of writing, even those outside of humanities majors.
“It’s not unusual to see someone working on a lab report for a science class, writing up a journal for an internship and commenting on a friend’s Facebook status, all at the same time on three different screens,” Dean said. “Then that person will say she isn’t a writer.”
The National Day on Writing was also about new opportunities. Writing workshops took place in the Hodges Library Practice Presentation Room every 30 minutes, with exercises like writing an autobiography in six words, writing a PostSecret note, penning a one- to three-page story on Halloween and learning how to e-mail professors properly.
Dean led a workshop on Twitter poetry, writing original poems in 140 characters or less and found poems based on selections from other Twitter accounts. She saw potential in words from film director David Lynch’s Twitter, as well as Cleveland Cavaliers center Shaquille O’Neal’s.
“Surprisingly, Shaquille O’Neal (is) very poetic,” she said. “He just tweets really randomly about things that happen in his day, and if you just picked three or four words here and there, you could make a poem out of it.”
Born out of the National Day on Writing, the new Web site, http://www.utwrites.net, launched on Tuesday, archives submitted writing. According to the site, the UT Writes project is to gather people’s definitions of writing as well as examples of their personal kind of writing. The site will stay open for 30 days.