TH National Creative Writing Competition (extended)

Just a note that the deadline for this competition has been extended to 1 Aug 2009.

Temasek Hall (NUS) is organising a creative writing competition and is seeking short stories (max 1500 words) featuring main characters grappling with current socio-educational issues in the Singapore school setting. Cash prizes include S$500 for distinction works and S$250 for merit works.

Requirements:

• Original work not exceeding 1500 words, typed double spaced
• Each entry should have a cover page with the writer’s name, school, email address, telephone number and word count.
• Writers’ name should not appear on the pages of the story.

Email story to: tehbox1@nus.edu.sg

ERP information

The upcoming ERP assignment (Wed 8 July) will be an expository piece comparing a specific idea in your two books. The details will only be unveiled when you get the questions on the actual day.

This assignment will be marked in a similar manner as the commentary assessment you did last term - I've uploaded the Expository Writing Rubric from that assignment as a quick reference. The actual rubric will differ slightly, but should be pretty similar.

You may bring in your books and refer to them while doing the assignment, but no extra notes will be allowed.

More subscribers wanted!

Subscription rate is still less than optimal, if the class has some sort of mass email account (yahoogroups?), is it possible for someone to help notify the rest of your classmates to please come by and subscribe?

Instructions can be found here if required.

Summary Exercise Answers

Here are the answers for the summary exercises. They're currently set to go offline after a month, so please save/print them now if you'd like to keep a copy.

The first one (Ex 3 Answers) demonstrates the method I'd suggested about writing each point you identify in your own words prior to writing your actual summary, which is an approach you might find useful, depending on your style.

Summary Ex 3 Answers
Summary Ex 4 Answers

Back to school

See you guys on Tuesday!

Start brainstorming...

For your next lesson (Thursday), you will be given time to brainstorm and discuss about your social advocacy project, in your project groups.

In the meantime, you could start thinking about what you might like your group to embark on for the project. Past year project include proposing the construction of an overhead bridge in an accident-prone area and installation of solar panels in RI. Some of these proposals were actually accepted and acted on (like the overhead bridge) - such projects are likely to score near-full marks, as they have demonstrated a good choice of issue and effectiveness of persuasion.

The scope can range from a very broad issue to a very specific one - however, specific issues tend to be more trivial (affecting a smaller population) and broad issues tend to have a lower chance of succeeding (difficult to implement a change in laws that affect the whole of Singapore, for example). The trick is finding a balance between the two - more advice will be provided by your teacher as the weeks progress.

Youth Writers Awards Asia 2010

Since the take-up rate for EL competitions so far has been rather poor, your teachers have decided to make this one compulsory for all of you. The deadline is 30 Sep 2009, so you'll be able to work on it over the June holidays.

Essentially, you are to write a short story (500-800 words) describing "the nature of individual love and passion for sport(s) including values such as friendship, honesty, fair play, hard work etc".

The top 30 entries will be published in a book that will be distributed to the participants of the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games. In addition, the winners will receive a copy of said book, a return air trip to a location in Asia (top 5 entries), a pair of tickets to the Youth Olympic Games (top 5 entries), or a Reader's Digest book (other 25 entries).

Submission can be done by mail or online. You can download a copy of the full instructions here (PDF format). This is also available on Ask n Learn.