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Printer-Friendly ModeBraun winners demonstrate skills
April 18, 2011 —
For any student that has, for the first time since it was assigned a month ago, checked a rubric sheet for a ten page paper due the next day, there is an element of dread associated with writing.
For students who choose to prepare, there exists the Braun Writing Awards. Held on Wed. April 13 in the Emeriti Room, the 14th annual Braun Writing Awards were given to student papers nominated for literary excellence.
A committee representing the major colleges at SVSU as well as the Writing Program decided on winners from a group of papers nominated by faculty members. This year the eight winners that were selected covered a wide range of subject matter and writing styles.
Diane Boehm, University Writing Program director and committee member, said winners have the opportunity to use the award as validation of their writing skills for employers.
The College of Health and Human Services award went to nursing student Smriti Pant for her term paper “Altered Life Process: Tourette Syndrome,” a paper she chose to bring awareness to the disorder after caring for a patient with the disorder in her pediatric rotation. Smriti commented on how helpful the writing center was in developing her paper.
“It really meant a lot to me and gave me that added confidence each time I worked on that paper,” Pant said. “It was so worth it and she (Diane Boehm) taught me so much. I could not thank her enough.”
Other winners included Dalton Allan and Brian Dalke, who represented the College of Science, Engineering and Technology with their paper “A Fractal Image,” and Rebecca Griffin’s “The International Job Hunt,” which won under the College of Business and Management.
Melinda Clifton’s “Unit Plan on To Kill a Mockingbird” was recognized by the College of Education award. The College of Arts and Behavioral Sciences award went to Ashley Hanson for her political science paper.
Amy Daniels won the General Education award for “Through Diomedes’ Eyes” and Moira Maus won the Graduate Program award for “Warren Mervyn: Prosocial Community Catalyst.”
Vanguard writers Kirsten McIlvenna and Tim Windy won a Braun Award and a Tyner Prize, respectively. McIlvenna won the Braun Multimedia award for “The Art of Remixing” and Windy won the Tyner Prize for his poetry collection.
The annual Tyner Prizes for Writing Excellence were given out to Heidi Hall and Stephanie Reinhardt.
Reinhardt, an English literature and French major, said the most important advice she could give to student writers “is to pick an idea and stick with it.”
She said that students will focus on cramming everything they know into a paper instead of developing a central idea.
Her paper, “‘We Write Fiction Because We Must’: Language, Narrative, and Meaning in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” examines postmodernism in Jonathan Safron Foer’s novel.
Along with student papers, an Innovative Writing in Teaching award is handed out annually to a faculty member who finds a new way to incorporate writing into the curriculum.
This year, the award went to assistant professor Rose Lange for using wikias in her nursing class. Lange, who has assigned a paper on a health issue in the community, found that students “didn’t think about how it really affected them.”
By changing it to a weekly blog exercise and to a collaborative Wikia on a topic chosen by the students, Lange said that students “dwell on the topic, stay with it, think with it... and the process allows them to actively edit and critique each other.”
Also during the reception, McKenna Bischer’s “Grief: A Core Phenomenon in Nursing,” Brandon Rushton’s “The Duties of Man: A New Revolution,” and Steven Mankoci’s “The Plastic Plague” received honorable mentions.