Last week, the Outreach team participated in National Day on Writing by heading to the student center to engage with people and to learn about why they write. For those who don’t know, National Day on Writing is a day that “celebrates the importance, joy, and evolution of writing” and which uses #WhyIWrite to communicate to the world how necessary writing is to our lives. To participate in this, we started with a big poster board of an open book and invited passersby to write on pencil cutouts and to explain why they write.
A lot of people we talked to were eager to share #WhyIWrite, and before long, our board filled up. Some people took the activity and the question of “Why Do You Write?” to a really introspective place, stating answers such as “For Love :)” and “To document my life in case no one else does.” Other people, however, write for more pragmatic reasons, such as “I write to finish Bio Labs” and “I write so I will pass college.”
Of all of the people that Outreach Team talked to, everyone had a different and unique reason as to why they write. Participating in National Day on Writing was a great opportunity to engage with all different kinds of writers at the student center and to reinforce to the DePaul community the UCWbL’s Core Belief that “Anyone who writes anything is a writer.”