“WritEng╳Write Now” of NCCU Eng: Not Just a Workshop

Date : 2022-05-11 Department : Department of English

【Article by Department of English】

The Department of English is presenting a series of writing workshops, and the first of them, “Pages from the Life of a Passionate Blogger” with the guest speaker, Jenny Chang, was held as a Writing and Reading workshop on April 21.

Hosted by the Chair of Department of English, Siaw-Fong Chung, these writing workshops are part of a writing project sponsored by the Center for Learning and Teaching Development.

In order to encourage innovative teaching styles and promote diverse topics in teaching, Professor Chung invited two fellow faculty members, John Michael Corrigan and Michael Cheng, to bring their classes to join hers for the speech and the ensuing interactive activities. About forty students participated in the workshop.

Jenny Chang, an alumna of the Department of English, is a freelance movie review writer and sports writer. She separated the workshop into two parts: her own experience as a writer and then her techniques for writing movie reviews and for writing sports articles.

Chang explained the structures of movie reviews and sports stories before setting a hands-on task for the students. The three classes of students watched the fourth quarter of a local basketball game and wrote a short game story afterward to get a feel for covering a sporting event as a sports writer.

Since not all students were familiar with basketball, Chang prepared a glossary of basketball terminology and the box scores of the game for the students. Professors also wrote their stories and posted them in the Facebook club, and more writing will be posted on the WritEng platform.

WritEng is a writing project as well as a new article-sharing platform created by the Department of English in 2022. The name of this platform –WritEng (‘Write’ and ‘English’) – and its cover logo are all creative products of students from the Department of English. The webpage is also administered by the students.

There are two goals for the WritEng project – first, it aims to archive the department magazine, the ONE Magazine (click to see a sample) (and the later ONE Online Blog), which started around 2002 and has ceased publication since 2016. Second, it is now a web-based platform and also a Facebook club that invites new writing submissions from all the members of our department. The professors also encourage students to share their work on Medium (click to see a sample article) before they submit to the platform.

WritEng will serve as an avenue for sharing writing products, writing ideas, and even creative work. These products have often been produced as part of a course’s assigned classwork, and they might disappear after a class ended. By encouraging students to share their writing online, their writing will be remembered and shared with a wider audience on this website.

Chang shared that even if some writing activities might seem unrelated right now, it is possible that they will all connect with each other one day. As a required course, Writing and Reading provides students of the Department of English the basic skills of writing, and the WritEng project is the place where the students’ writing possibilities can burgeon.

More information:

Click on this video to know more about the Department of English.

The 2022 Graduation Play 

The 2022 Summer English Camp