Academic Writing Competition
This year, the Academic Writing Centre launched its first writing competition. All undergraduate students were invited to submit a short piece of 450-550 words for the opportunity to see their work in print and to win a €100 voucher.
A new venture in the University, the competition showcases the skills associated with essay writing; it does not award prizes to essays submitted as part of the students’ course of study. The aim is to combat the unfortunate view of academic writing as an arbitrary collection of restricting rules. Instead, academic writing should be seen as a genre, a form of expression with a unique set of conventions and traditions, on a par with free verse, drama, or journalistic writing.
We have decided on the 500 word length for submissions because this is the standard word limit for academic abstracts. There is scope for developing a strong, well-structured, and original argument which engages with other writers’ ideas. Inspired by the principles of competitive debating, the set topics for the competition were not overly serious. Points were awarded for structural coherence and verbal dexterity, not the content of the pieces.
The winning piece is below and is also published in Sin Newspaper. We would like to thank all the members of staff who supported this venture for their help and advice.
AWC Competition Winner 2012
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This year’s academic writing competition winner is Bailey Gunn, a visiting student of English. Her tongue-in-cheek discussion of chaos theory and Galway life is a well-structured argument notable for its fresh language, syntactic variety, and witty use of citations. We would like to thank all those who took part. Please email writingcentre@nuigalway.ie if you would like to get feedback on your essay. We hope to have another competition next year. |
Saturation and Satiation by Bailey Gunn
When a butterfly first emerges from its cocoon, its wings are wet. It is literally drenched in its past life as a caterpillar. Thus, to fly it must dry. After some bubbling inner turmoil of preparedness, to aid the process, it works up the courage to pump its wings for the first time. From this single wing beat, Edward Lorenz developed his chaos theory. He elucidated that the flap of a butterfly’s wing can either begin or eliminate specific weather patterns, such as tornadoes (Lorenz 181). As a result, Lorenz explained that predicting the weather would become very difficult and problematic (183). However, like the butterfly itself, the denizens of Galway are not affected by Lorenz’s theory, for they have always adapted to chaos.
Perhaps it would be most effective to consider this thesis in relation to the butterfly’s maturation process. As previously stated, the butterfly arises in its new form completely flooded. In a metaphorical sense, this saturation is indicative of the fact that it hosts all that it needs from the birth of its altered state. Likewise, a human, in the amniotic fluid, is born not as an empty vessel, but with a soul that is as bottomless as a pint of Guinness. With this in mind, deceptive puddles that appear as shallow as a tide pool plunge deeper than the Atlantic, and black clouds threaten silently from above on a day that warms and whispers in the peeking sun. These correlating ideas thus establish that Galwegians, like the butterfly, are unaffected by the chaos around them and have no need for predictions to warn them of their own world. They are quite literally steeped in it already.
Yet, the parallels do not end there. Drip-dried, wings like stained glass and just as fragile, butterflies must then attempt their first flight. Predictions are not needed here either, for the small breath that is produced by the butterfly’s tentative flap is of his own jurisdiction. In a literal sense, the strong wills of the Galway citizens mirror this wind, which may or may not have originated from a butterfly in China, for they have harnessed its power to sail their boats, and procure food. These gusts of chaos colour their proverbs and redden their cheeks, as they wish that the ‘wind may always be at your back’. In short, Galway does not heed prophecy, nor do Galwegians fear the proportion of their successes, although they are only too ready to celebrate them in the pubs.
As Lorenz postulates, ‘the butterfly, with its seeming frailty and lack of power, is a natural choice for a symbol of the small that can produce the great’ (15). Chaos, Galway seems to say, does not rely on wind or rain, but on perspective. And remember, perspective is relative, for butterflies taste with their feet.
Works Cited
Lorenz, Edward. The Essence of Chaos. 1993. London: UCL Press Limited, 1995. Print.
