Research projects in English 110 are designed to afford students the opportunity to choose and explore complex topics, deepen their knowledge about those subjects, and develop their informed perspectives into thesis-driven essays. The six winners of this year’s Arak Award have taken full advantage of that opportunity, and we are pleased to share their exemplary work with a wider audience.

As we do every year, the editors and selection committee invite readers of the journal, particularly those who are students in English 110, to expand their notion of what research in a first-year writing course can be. We want readers to see the possibilities that can result from the creativity, rigor, time, and tenacity required to produce a strong research-based argument. Our hope is to inspire students to take on ambitious, complex, socially engaged writing projects of their own.

Diversity of topic choices continues to be an important feature of the Arak Journal, and we are pleased to have that be the case again this year. Our winners chose to pursue a range of topics, from portrayal of acid rain in films, to black maternal mortality rates, to the rising costs of Insulin. These authors engaged deeply and personally with challenging topics, and they approached those topics in nuanced ways. We applaud them for their efforts, and we hope readers will appreciate the different strengths each essay brings to this year’s issue. 

This year, for the first time, we asked for multimodal submissions in addition to traditional print-based essays. As the First Year Writing (FYW) program acknowledges as a course objective that writing in the 21st century uses not only letters and numbers, but images, sounds, and other modes of communication that capitalizes on the affordances of both print and digital platforms, we want to use the Arak Journal as an opportunity to honor the multimodal work our students do. We are excited to share a short documentary about human factors as a part of the decline of fireflies as one of the six essays in this year’s journal.

The six essays were selected from close to 100 submissions reviewed by instructors of English 110. Our selection committee of enthusiastic, indefatigable writing instructors went through three rigorous stages of evaluation. Editors worked with the student writers to source check and edit the essays for publication.

None of this would be possible without a generous financial gift from Sydney F. Arak and Ruth Toor in honor of their parents, John and Frieda Arak. A sincere thank you to Mr. Arak, Ms. Toor, and the many others across the University of Delaware’s campus who believe that writing is at the heart of learning and discovery.

To learn more about the UD FYW Program, please visit our website, OneHundredTen.org.

Meg McGuire
Associate Director of FYW Program
Associate Professor