Writing Today Cadets meet with NPR

In conjunction with the West Point Writing Fellows program, the Department of English and Philosophy sponsored the “Writing Today” AIAD. Five cadets and two faculty members engaged in a comprehensive residential study of the vital roles that writing and its practice play in academia, government, journalism, non-profit foundations, corporate America, and in the lives of the nation’s veterans. Through on-site visits over eleven days throughout the Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington, D.C. area, cadets engaged with professors, social scientists, broadcasters and journalists, curators, consultants, and speechwriters at Johns Hopkins, the Naval Academy, Rutgers, the Frameworks Institute, NPR, the Smithsonian, Pherson Associates, Booz-Allen-Hamilton, the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House. Notably, cadets met with the speechwriting teams for the President of the United States, the Secretary of the Army, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief and Vice Chiefs of Staff and the Sergeant Major of the Army, and interacted with the digital media staff of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives. In each instance and across every discipline, cadets learned about the importance of audience, framing one’s narrative, and communicating with precision, concision, consistency, and substantive depth.