Providence Day School junior Emily Orland was one of two North Carolina students to receive a “superior” rating in the 2018 Achievement Awards in Writing.

Sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the Achievement Awards in Writing is a school-based writing program established in 1957 to encourage high school students in their writing and to publicly recognize some of the best student writers in the nation.

Schools of PDS’s size are eligible to nominate one junior, who sends one self-selected piece of writing and who writes an essay in response to a prompt. The PDS Upper School English department chose Emily based on her work. She then composed an essay on the NCTE prompt on “changing the narrative.”

This year, 461 juniors were nominated. Of that number, 226 received Certificates for Superior Writing and 235 received Certificates of Nomination. The student submissions were read by national judges who evaluated expression of ideas, language use and unique perspective and voice.