Thursday, October 20th is National Day on Writing!

Happy National Day of Writing! It’s a great opportunity to celebrate writing in all forms, to cultivate your own unique voice and to add it to the collective, to compose and contribute in whatever way you find most meaningful. National Day on Writing is an opportunity to consider why you write, the role it has in your life, and perhaps even how your writing is expanding in new media composing environments (social media, photos / videos, digital writing and blogging, such as your work on the OpenLab …).

A primary way this day is being celebrated / organized is through the use of a hashtag: #WhyIWrite. As stated on the NCTE’s (National Council of Teachers of English) website for the day: “The National Day on Writing® celebrates writing—and the many places, reasons, and ways we write each day—as an essential component of literacy. Since 2009, #WhyIWrite has encouraged thousands of people to lift their voices to the things that matter most to them.”

You can follow this live conversation unfolding on Twitter & other social media platforms, and participate there if you want. Or you can simply browse the national conversation happening online to get inspiration).

Below are three additional suggestions for celebrating the day from the National Day on Writing website:

  1. Keep track of all the writing you do

    Text message? Birthday card? Tweet? Keep track of them all, and find out how much you really write! Share your numbers with friends and see who writes most.
  2. Play some language games

    If not for our writing prowess, we couldn’t participate in spelling bees, Scrabble, Scattergories, Taboo, Mad Libs, Hangman, and many others. Celebrate your word power with a round of your favorite word game.
  3. Write something outside your comfort zone

    Have you ever written lyrics to a song? A sonnet? A piece of flash fiction? A toast? Venture into an unfamiliar territory, writing-wise, and let those creative juices flow. You may surprise yourself.

Anyone who wants to do so may blog about #whyIWrite for extra credit. This is an optional post, and can be approached any way you feel would be most appropriate … feel to be as creative as you’d like! You could (but don’t have to!) discuss formal, professional, or academic writing; you could discuss personal writing, creative writing, txting, or anything else.It would be super-awesome to include some of your own writing (essays, poems, stories, etc.) if you feel comfortable doing so, as well as images, videos, links, and/or anything that will help us to understand why you write and what writing means to you!

The post should be published on Thursday, October 20th to time it with the national conversation that will happen that day. If you want to write it ahead of time, that’s fine: just “schedule” the post to appear any time on Thursday (to do so, edit the “Publish Immediately” option in the “Publish” box in the upper right, and change the date to 10/20 and choose a time during that day for your post to appear). [Categorize as “#WhyIWrite”]