It’s February 2024, and that means it’s time for the second annual National Essay Writing Month.
I hear you muttering to yourself, “What the hell is that?” Let me explain.
I started NaEsWriMo last year as a potentially fun and thought-provoking thing for all my kids to do and score some cash along the way. The idea is that I would give them a writing prompt, and they would have a month to construct an essay based on that. Submissions would be read by a third party who would pick a winner.
Winning is solely based on the content of the essay, not the writing style, grammar, or punctuation. The winning author would receive $100, and all participants would receive $20 as long as their submission seemed to have had some effort put into it.
For added fun, I generated an essay using Chat GPT and added it to the mix. If that submission were the winner, I would use the $100 to take Nora out on a date.
Last year was about censorship. Should it exist? Does it have value? Sadly, I only received two submissions, but a winner was picked. I’m going to link to the three I sent off to the evaluator, so if you’re curious, you can see.
This year, I’ve asked what the age of reason should be in the USA. This means that at what age should people be allowed to do things like vote, drink alcohol, serve the country, etc? I’ve opened it up for the kids to solicit entries from their significant others. Quietly I would like it to grow each year, but I’m not made of money so I’m not sure how viable that is.
Here are links to PDFs of the submissions.
The Detrimental Effects of Word Censorship
Would you enter a writing competition?