Four North Penn Students Awarded National Essay Prize

LANSDALE, PA – Four North Penn High School students have been recognized for their performance in the 2016 National Council of the Teachers of English Writing Contest.

The annual competition requires high school juniors from across the country to submit a piece of writing of their choice as well as a response to an assigned prompt. Submissions are anonymously rated by national judges on the basis of content, purpose, audience, tone, word choice, organization, development and style.

For this contest students were required to submit a poem or prose piece that they felt represented their best work, excluding research and critical papers. Students additionally wrote a themed essay in which they were asked to examine the conflict between nurturing passions and meeting obligations and respond in a personal or imaginative prose piece that considered whether these two areas can be reconciled.

Nationwide 533 juniors whom their teachers identified as outstanding writers were nominated to participate in the contest. Of this already selective group, only 264 were recognized for superior writing skills. Ten of those students were from Pennsylvania, and among them, four were NPHS Advanced Placement (AP) English Language and Composition students Stefan Jablowkow, Aparna Mukerji, Grace Shinners and Yang Yue.

Congratulations to the student winners, as well as NPHS English teachers Janet Kratz and Ellen McKee for proudly representing the North Penn School District in the National Council of the Teachers of English Writing Competition.