Today, I attended the workshop regarding the book published by Hwa Chong Institution – Towerhill. After attending the workshop, I realised I had learned quite a lot of things form the editors of the book – Towerhill. The original title is actually “Parnassus”, which is the hilltop home of Greek Muses, and the home of music, poetry, learning. However, it’s rejected due to the fact that it is too hard to comprehend.
The book, TowerHill, is a book that collates and pieces of writing like poetry form our very own Hwa Chong students. Most of them are from seniors like 2 or 3 years back. The front cover of the book comprises only black and white colour. The editors of the book decided to choose the theme black and white as it looks very elegant and simple. And it really does. The font used is just normal magazine fonts.
The book is actually split up into 2 sections, the first talking about culture and traditional elements, whereas the second section talks about a new era, a progression towards the future. The editors explained that they wanted to create a natural progression from past to present, an improvement of the writings of HCI students. It is also represented by the clock on the person drawn on the cover page. I realised that the theme that the editors displayed is very meaningful. The natural progression is something new and I learned from the theme and the clock that in whatever we do, there will always be times we will look back. It is the time when we will ponder upon our own actions and reflect, have we done the right thing? What had I done that is beneficial to others? We also have to think out of the box and constant improve ourselves, which is why we live for, to always improve ourselves.
That is also one of the obstacles that we had to overcome when we published our writings. When we published our work, we always faced the same fear – Will our works be mocked at? Will people laughed at my works? When we think along that line, it’s probably a sign that we have not done our best. We should always put our best foot forward and strive to our very best. Therefore, when even we ourselves are not confident of our work, how do we expect others to admire it? Even though sometimes we had tried our very best but still get laughed at, we should look at it in a positive way. It means that we still had room for improvement and we should be lucky that we get the comments from all the readers. It’s also a platform to allow the readers to learn from the excellent writings.
Speaking of excellent writings, I had a few glimpse of the book and I realised that though the entries are by students from HCI, they are excellent as their poems manage to catch my attention and also bring out the theme successfully. One of the poems (I cannot remember the name) speaks about the culture of Chinese people dying off and I think it had succeed, especially the last sentence, when it speaks about not the clothes of the people, but they themselves. From the writings, we could actually learn the different figurative language used and applied it to our Language Arts. We could also get our inspirations from the writings there, to inspire us to write our own poems, and who knows, we might be the next “Towerhill”!
I also think the workshop is very meaningful as we not only get to know more about the book, but also do our part in lending our hand for the Japanese. The book is sold at $10 and the money collected will be used to help the Japan crisis. I think that it is very worth it as we can do our part to display our kindness, and at the same time, get a book full of excellent writings, isn’t that killing two birds with one stone?
One of the main aims that the editors attempt to reach is not to achieve polished and bombastic writings. They just want to make it simple for the readers as they think that elegance words are not all for books. I totally agree with that. Some of the books just make full use of difficult words, so as to make it look or sound “professional”, which I don’t think is the case. I think that we write to express not impress, and the aim of our writing is to actually let the reader enjoy and indulge in our readings, to experience our feelings we had at that time. We should not just impress the reader with profound words when the reader does not even understand the book. Beauty and significance can too be shown from even the simplest expressions. Therefore, I think simplicity is the best, just keep the sentences short and sweet and I believe it can be a good book too.
From this workshop, I had indeed learned a lot of writing techniques, such as the elements of simple and elegance, and also the passion behind the editors. A short yet meaningful workshop indeed!
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