Prized Writing Student Published in College Writing Textbook
Renee Danielle Singh’s anthropology paper, “Our Roots Go Back to Roanoke: Investigating the Link between the Lost Colony and the Lumbee People of North Carolina”—originally published in the 2005-2006 volume of Prized Writing—has now been re-published in The College Writer: A Guide to Thinking, Writing, and Researching (Houghton Mifflin, 2009). The text uses Singh’s essay to exemplify the APA-style research paper.
Ms. Singh is currently a second year doctoral student in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, & School Psychology, at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, at UC Santa Barbara. “I will always be grateful to Prized Writing,” she writes, “for giving me my first publication and for helping me get into grad school!”
Ms. Singh’s paper began as a response to an assignment in Anthropology 153, “Human Biological Variation,” taught by David Glenn Smith. According to Professor Smith in his introductory comments to the essay in Prized Writing, “Ms. Singh draws upon genetic, linguistic, historical, even immunological, evidence to argue that, as recounted in local legend and folk mythology, the lost colonists intermarried with, and were absorbed by, the sixteenth-century ancestors of the Lumbee. She ends with the irony that the European ancestry of the Lumbee today is regarded as too high to warrant recognizing them as a tribal entity with consequential federal benefits. Her essay illustrates the growing importance of both the politics of ancestry and the influence of genetics on the perception and definition of self.” Professor Smith writes, also, that the essay ranked among the top 10 student essays he’d read in his 29 years as an anthropology professor.
In her own introductory remarks in Prized Writing, Renee credits her success to her knack for storytelling: “While it’s easy for me to sit down and write stories, writing scientific term papers is something I struggle with. Perhaps this is because I’m a “storyteller”and “storytelling” is usually not allowed in “scientific” writing. But while writing this paper, I couldn’t resist throwing in a little bit of “storytelling” along with all the “scientific” stuff because I considered the plight of the Lost Colony an unfinished story in its own right. And since no one really knew what happened to the Lost Colonists of Roanoke, I decided to treat the paper’s subject matter as a story best finished by science.”
Our congratulations, then, to scientist and storyteller, Renee Danielle Singh, whose work will now be available to inspire new generations of student writers.
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