Contest enthralled young writers

Editor’s note:  This column is being reprinted from Feb. 27, 2008. Jack judged plenty of journalism contests in his day, but a head-to-head, live, time-limit competition was a different story. Deadline pressure changes the writing process and, like for these competitors, often gets the adrenaline flowing.

Americans love to compete.

Basketball, football, baseball, track, and a dozen other sports get our juices stirring.

In business, competition is the name of the game.

You name it, we figure out a way to compete at it.

Years ago, Connie and I attended a baseball game where the guys behind us had a standing bet every half an inning over whether the pitcher would leave the ball on the grass or in the dirt of the pitcher’s mound. The game itself wasn’t enough; they needed a little more competitive action.

So I guess a writing competition shouldn’t have surprised me.

I’m not talking about a contest where published articles or books are judged. Those I’m familiar with.

Instead, I’m talking about head-to-head, on deadline competitive writing.

It’s called Power of the Pen, and it drew me to Mississinawa Middle School, east of Union City, Ohio, on Saturday.

The organizer of the regional competition, a teacher at Mississinawa named Elaine Bailey, had asked me to be one of the “best of round” judges. Flattered, I agreed without having a clue what I was getting into.

As far as I know, Indiana has nothing like Power of the Pen.

It works something like this: Dozens of seventh and eighth grade students from several different middle schools arrive at the same location. There, they are divided into groups of about a dozen based upon grade level. Though they compete for points as teams, the writing is done strictly solo and students from the different schools are mixed together.

And what do they write?

That’s where it gets interesting. There are three rounds, with a time limit for each round. At the start of a round, the students are given a “prompt,” something around which they are to write a story, an essay, or a composition of some sort.

Each group’s papers are judged by a teacher who selects the best of that round for that particular prompt. All of those “best of group” papers are then submitted to a panel that judges the overall “best of round.”

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. The man-hours involved are incredible, and the chore of judging is divided among dozens of teachers.

Six of us judged the “best of round” finalists, three for seventh grade and three for eighth grade. Two of the judges were teachers, one was a librarian, one was a retired teacher, and two of us —the editor of the Greenville Daily Advocate and I — were newspapermen.

There were 11 groups at the seventh grade level, so over the course of the day, with three prompts, we read a total of 33 different compositions.

So what did we read?

A little bit of everything.

The first prompt was, “Do something stupid in your story.”

So we read 11 finalists full of characters doing goofy, middle school kinds of things. Several of them involved walking into open locker doors, which must be a serious hazard at the middle school level.

The second prompt was, “The color of (fill in the blank).”

That’s when the young writers took a serious turn. Something about the prompt sent them off in gloomy directions: Death, war, loss, anger, illness, and still more death.

The winner in that round caught us off-guard with an essay titled, “The Color of Your Shirt.” It was about diversity and social stereotypes, and it was a real stand-out.

The third prompt was, “The main character in your story is a wizard.”

That, predictably enough, took us off on a whirlwind of Harry Potter-mania.

By the end, all of the judges had bleary eyes. But the young writers were stoked and looked as if they were ready for another round.

As for me, my prompt was simple: “Find the shortest way home.”