A Writing Competition Your Teen Should Know About
Competitions can be an excellent way to get students motivated and focused. Unfortunately, when it comes to writing, very few national competitions are available for high schoolers.
That’s what makes the Scholastic Art & Writing Award (“Scholastic”) special. This annual competition is open to students in grades 7-12 who reside in the U.S., U.S. territories and Canada. Based on the submitted work, each region gives out awards including Gold Keys, Silver Keys, and Honorable Mentions. Gold Key winners then advance to the national competition, where they compete for Gold Medals, Silver Medals, and the American Voices and Visions, and more awards.
The organizers clearly want to foster a love of writing, and they have created a thoughtful structure to do so. Students may submit work in a variety of categories, including personal essay and memoir, poetry, flash fiction, and critical essay. They are also allowed to submit multiple pieces, as long as each piece is submitted under only one category.
While the national awards are extremely competitive, Scholastic honors thousands of students with prizes every year. Strong writers have a very solid chance of receiving regional recognition.
I often describe it as a no-loss opportunity when encouraging students to participate:
If they win recognition, students gain confidence and may even discover a hidden strength. They can also list the award on their application to universities.
If they don’t win any award, students still benefit from the process as they’ll improve their writing skills while revising and polishing their essays. And if a piece is strong, it can often be revised for publication, posting, or submission to another competition.
This year, two 7Cs students received the prestigious Gold Medal and Silver Medal, respectively, on the national level. As importantly, nearly half of the 7Cs students who participated in Scholastic received at least one regional award, and most of them were first-time contestants. One ninth grader won four awards including a Gold Key. Another student modified an essay originally written for another competition and won a Gold Key. A third student, who never thought of himself as a writer, won a Gold Key for his verse fiction.
So if your teen enjoys writing, participate in Scholastic! The submission deadline is typically in December.
Here are a couple practical tips:
Submit multiple pieces of work. Each piece of writing is judged independently, and submitting multiple pieces helps increase the chance of receiving recognition. This also means that students should write regularly throughout the year and build a portfolio they can revise for submission, rather than rushing to create something at the last minute.
Be thoughtful about your topic and message. It’s natural for students to focus on their own experiences and emotions, and self-reflection is a wonderful tool for growth. At the same time, it can be powerful to reflect on the people around them and on issues affecting society and the wider world. Develop a clear and positive message, and deliver it at the end to make the essay soar.
Most importantly, we should always help our teens appreciate the joy and power of writing, which is not an easy task in this day and age. As the acclaimed author Daniel Pink once said, "Writing is an act of discovering what you think and what you believe".
