"Best Student Nonfiction" book receives 175 entries

In our second year of publishing our "Best of Student Writing," we received a very large number (175) of entries. Last year we had about fifty fewer. Today one of my students who submitted an essay said, "The amazing thing is that I've never thought of myself as a writer before. I'm more math and science. But I've really come to think of myself as a writer, too. My parents are going to be so mad." At this point, I told this student about my current nonfiction writer, Atul Gawande, a renowned surgeon... and author of bestselling books. In his book Better (which I highly recommend), Gawande says that one of the things he learned while writing the book is that the best practitioners of every particular field that he studied (obstetricians in India, CF specialists in Minnesota, hospital administrators in Detroit, emergency room docs in Iraq, etc.) shared on trait: they wrote about their fields as a way to think through their own projects and to communicate their findings with others.