Excellence in First-Year Writing 2010/2011

The English Department Writing Program and the Sweetland Center for Writing established a first-year writing prize in order to celebrate the accomplishments of student writers near the beginning of their careers at the University of Michigan. First-year writing classrooms at this university are designed to be spaces where students can explore questions of genuine interest to them and challenge themselves as writers, peer reviewers, and thinkers. Here in this volume we see the impressive results of these challenging explorations. We want to emphasize that this writing, like all successful writing, was the result of painstaking revision and probably moments of doubt, frustration, pleasure, and triumph (and that can be the triumph sometimes of simply finally finding the right word). As writers, we all continue to hone our skills at capturing complex ideas and arguments in lucid, sophisticated, audience-appropriate, and often compelling ways throughout our careers. We all experience our prose falling apart when we try to write something more challenging than we’ve ever written before, and then we can see what we have gained as writers as we put the pieces back together again. It does get easier to put the pieces back together over time, and we do best as writers always to embrace the challenge, knowing that in the end it will make us stronger, savvier writers.