【推荐1】Top 4 Writing Contests of 2023

The Betty Award

As one of the few competitions for elementary and middle school students, The Betty Award grants (授了) cash prizes for written pieces below 1,000 words. The Betty Award has both a Spring &. Fall contest.

Top prize: $ 300

Entry fee: S 20

Deadline: April 30, 2023

100-Word Writing Contest

100 words or less per entry is a must. Submit as many entries as you’d like. All ages, genders, nationalities and writers are welcome. The theme is using humor as healing (治愈)。

Top prize: $ 800

Entry fee: $ 10

Deadline: May 13, 2023

Teen Writing Contest

The Ann Arbor District Library is excited to host its 30th annual Teen Writing Contest in Winter 2023! Young adult authors take part as judges each year, who then read and select the winning stories. Stories are judged in three different categories: Grades 6—8, Grades 98.10, and Grades 11812.

Top prize: $ 250

Additional prizes: 2nd/ $ 150; 3rd/ $75

Entry fee: FREE

Deadline: August 15, 2023

Bennington Young Writers Awards

Bennington College has a unique literary legacy (遗产), including 12 Pulitzer Prize winners, countless New York Times bestsellers, and two of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. In celebration of this legacy， Bennington launched the Young Writers Awards to promote excellence in writing at the high school level.

Top prize: $ 1,000

Additional prizes: 2nd/ $ 500; 3rd/ S 250

Entry fee: FREE

Deadline: September 10，2023

【推荐2】Have you ever heard of underwater football? Underwater football has been called one of the world’s least-known sports.     1     . The game can be enjoyed by anyone of any age and can be played under both indoor and outdoor water surfaces. Underwater football shares some common rules and play elements with other underwater sports like underwater hockey. As with those games, it is played in the deep end of a swimming pool with snorkeling(浮潜)equipment.

The goal of the game is to score a point by placing a ball on the opponents’ side of the pool. The ball can only be possessed by players who completely stay underwater holding their breath.     2    

Just like on land, underwater football is a game of control and possession.     3     . When opposing players are in your space, you need to be able to recognize it quickly and take appropriate action.

    4     . Each team tries to get their ball into one end zone by either passing or running through underwater obstacles. The first team to reach the endpoint wins! Just five players are on the court at one time, despite each team having 13 players.

To win the ball back or keep it away from your opponents, you must use all your strength and abilities underwater.     5     .

【推荐3】Competitive video gaming, known as e-sports, should be included in the Olympic Games, the creator of World of Warcraft has told the BBC.

Rob Pardo, who until July, 2014 was chief creative officer at Blizzard Entertainment, a famous game company, said that “sport” now had a broad definition. “Video games are well positioned to be a spectator sport (观赏性体育运动).“ he told Afternoon Edition on BBC S Live.

Professional e-sports events currently attract audiences of millions. A recent major final held in Seoul, South Korea, filled a stadium of 40,000 people, with many more watching online around the world.

”There’s a very good argument for e-sports being in the Olympics,“ said Mr. Pardo, who was also lead designer on Starcraft: Brood War, a game often credited with promoting the e-sports phenomenon.

”I think the way that you look at e-sports is that it is a very competitive skill and you look at these professional gamers and the reflexes are lightning quick and they’re having to make very quick decisions on the fly.

“When you look at their ‘actions per minute’, they’re clearing over 300.”

However, he admitted that video gaming faced a cultural battle to win over those who followed more physical sports.

“That starts getting into how you define sport,” he said. “If you want to define sport as something that takes a lot of physical exertion (用力气), then it’s hard to argue that video games should be a sport, but at the same time, when I’m looking at things that are already in the Olympics, I start questioning the definition.”

Having new sports admitted into the Olympic is a long-winded process and, since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) limited the number of sports allowed in the Games, has become increasingly difficult.

Even if e-sports were to be recognized as an Olympic sport, that doesn’t mean they would be included in the Games — it merely means a case can be presented to the IOC.

Until last January. I was very much a prose(散文)writer. I loved to write short stories but couldn’t stand poetry because it seemed like a lazy version. But then I entered a local poetry competition and won a prize. I read my poem at the award ceremony, and received a positive reaction from the audience. It was then that I realized poetry was much more interesting and diverse than I had previously thought, and that maybe I wasn’t too bad at writing it.

Since February. I have been trying to write poetry as often as possible, and it proves that somehow I like it now. Poetry isn’t a lazier version of prose, but it can be an easier one. This is because there are fewer rules in poetry and it is far more personal. What makes it so interesting is that it is told through the poet’s style.

This is what makes writing poetry such a good method of calming yourself down Writing about worries, stresses and insecurities can really help you to make sense of how you feel about them, and to create something-valuable from a bad situation. It also helps poems to catch on quickly. People love to hear personal stories about troubles they also struggle with.

Not only is poetry a fantastic form of therapy (治疗), but it can also earn you respect and sometimes even a career. As more and more poetry competitions for young people are set up, it is easier than ever to get recognized. As well as competitions, there are events such as poetry salons where you can share poems with others. Social media can also be a good platform for poetry.

So why not give it a try？Write about whatever is in your mind, and don’t worry about following any rules. Let yourself be inspired and inspire someone else.

【推荐3】It was 1963 in the Toronto suburb. I was eight years old and hockey (冰球) -crazy. My next-to-zero skills had not stopped my passion for the game. The players of the great hockey club Toronto Maple Leafs were of course my heroes, and their posters and photos covered the walls of my room.

There is always some price to pay for maintaining a love. I raised funds in an old-fashioned way, selling something the public could actually sink their teeth into. I joined the local annual event — Margaret’s Doughnuts (甜甜圈) to sell doughnuts, which offered choices of honey-glazed or chocolate-glazed.

Door-to-door I went, notebook in hand to record. I sold dozens of dozens; hardly a soul turned me down. My notebook was almost full, and my stomach was almost empty when I went up the last house on the south side.

I rang the doorbell and went over my speech while staring at the screen door. Suddenly, the door opened. My unforgettable memory was looking up from a large pair of fuzzy slippers, way up, to the face staring down. I stood there speechless for what seemed 10 years, opening and closing my mouth like a fish out of water. Collecting my calmness, but still unable to go into doughnut-promoting overdrive, I told him something he seemed have already known and he replied with a nod and a smile.

I have an unclear memory of murmuring through my speech “Please-buy-some-doughnuts”, and then a vivid memory of him taking the notebook from my hand. I followed with new information — that we shared our given name. With pride from our first-name-basis farewells, I flew home holding the notebook tightly to my chest.

The next morning before the school bell, I cautiously showed off the precious paper. It is surely mine alone to claim: I sold a dozen doughnuts to Tim Horton, one of my most respected players who lived a mere three blocks away!

When I think of the hardest moments of my life, ironically many have turned out to be blessings. The most severe one was being pretty much kicked out of my. PhD program at the University of Georgia in 2016.

The program in Georgia turned out not to be the right fit for me despite my best efforts. The whole year was riddled with exhaustion, insecurity, fear, and exclusion. I was in therapy myself for most of the year to cope, and the only thing that made it tolerable was a lot of support from my family and friends.

I was utterly devastated when I went back home; it felt like my career was over. Fast forward to today, however, and I can see that getting driven out of the Georgia program was one of the best things that ever happened to me. In 2017, when I transferred to a doctoral program in San Diego, I began to thrive and now my business is doing exceptionally well. I am deeply grateful I studied in San Diego and happy that I didn’t stay in Georgia. It was great that I was driven out! As the saying goes, “What seems like good or bad news now can turn out to be the opposite in the future.”

Ironically, the research and writing training from the University of Georgia significantly helped me develop my academic, professional, and personal writing. I worked hard in Georgia and it paid off: The learning and growth I experienced were incomparable.

As my personal example demonstrates, life is a total rollercoaster. Every now and then you are able to discover a new high, a ceiling-breaking moment, whereas in other moments you may feel like you’re falling deeper and deeper into hell. While these experiences can be incredibly tough, they present us with valuable opportunities to trust life and cultivate personal growth and learning.

【推荐3】When he was fourteen, his ambition was to run a pub, just like his dad.     1     With a chain of restaurants, a number of popular television series and best-selling cookery books, Jamie Oliver is a well-known name in every UK household. I'm a huge “Jamie fan”. I admire his passion for improving the food we eat and helping people change their lives.

    2     He took fifteen unemployed young people, with no previous experience of cooking, and trained them to be top-class chefs (厨师) in his restaurant, also called Fifteen. I remember one trainee, Lloyd Hayes. He left school with no qualifications and started getting into crime.     3     I think it's this kind of success story that makes Jamie and his projects so special.

Another special project is Jamie's Ministry of Food which he started in 2008. There are two aims: firstly, to teach people how to cook healthy, affordable food instead of eating fast food; secondly, to set up the Pass It On scheme: encouraging each person to pass on a recipe they learned to four other people.     4     Thousands of people have changed their cooking habits as a result — and I'm one of them. I've decided I'm not going to eat fast food anymore.

It's not only adults, but children, too. Jamie's School Dinners, one of Jamie's best-known projects, tried to improve food in schools and encourage children to eat well. It was difficult to convince some of the children, but in the end, many schools improved their menus.     5    

So, what's Jamie going to do next? Well, whatever it is, one thing is for sure, I'm not going to miss it!