She's Got a Perfect Way with Words

Three students representing in Belmont recently won honors in this year’s WordMasters Challenge, a competition for high school students requiring close reading and analysis of many different kinds of prose and poetry.  

In this school year’s second meet, held in December, senior Alex Tabing (Redwood City) and junior Clare Shaw (Los Altos) both earned perfect scores. Nationwide, only 16 eleventh graders and 27 twelfth graders earned perfect scores. Senior Naomi Hill (Moss Beach) was one of the 124 highest scoring twelfth graders nationwide.

Texts for the Challenge can range from short fiction by John Updike or Eudora Welty to poetry as old as Shakespeare’s or as recent as Margaret Atwood’s, and to essays as classic as E. B. White’s or as current as a Time Magazine opinion piece by James Poniewozick.

More than 54,000 students from 46 American states and four foreign countries participated in the competition.  Notre Dame's team was overseen by Frank Ryerson, the chair of the school's English department.

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