Three Eagan High School students won the NCTE award this year, and only five students were selected total from Minnesota. The students that won were juniors Yodahe Heramo, Andy Kemp and Helen Matsoff.

The NCTE, or the National Council of Teachers of English, has an awards program each year. Teachers throughout the state select the best creative papers from each of their classes and submit them. Each student selected must send in two papers: a paper they wrote from earlier in the year and a response to a prompt chosen by NCTE. Judges then read the students writing and judge it based on “content, purpose, audience, tone, word choice, organization, development, and style.”

This year, 796 students were nominated by their teachers for the exceptional writing skills they presented. Of those, 164 received Certificates for Superior Writing, five of the 164 came from Minnesota. Three of the winners came from Eagan, one student was from Eastview and one was from St. Michael-Albertville High School.

This was a very big deal to have gotten three of Eagan’s students chosen for the certificate. AP Language teacher, Mr. Mass, Shares his reaction to finding out three students from EHS had won, “I was very excited. We haven’t had three winners in awhile. We’ve had one or two, but three of the four we nominated was a very high number. We were all pretty thrilled.”

One of the winners from this year, Helen Matsoff, gives advice for next years juniors, “I’d suggest that people write like they talk, fairly casual. What they’re actually thinking. Dont try to make it really fancy or stilted anything.”

Yodohe Heramo also gave advice saying, “Drafts definitely help a lot. Sometimes, because we have to do multiple drafts some people are like ‘oh I shouldn’t try on my first one’ I think it’s a lot more helpful if you submit a good first draft. The writing might not be polished but getting the ideas down is good.”

“ I was really excited” Matsoff explains after winning the award, “It’s pretty cool”.