2023-2024

Engaging with poetry, either as a reader or a writer, can be a very positive experience, however we know that many young people do not choose to spend time reading or writing poetry.

ReWriter will be a new app, designed for young people, with young people, which aims to promote creativity and connection with poetry, giving young people the opportunity to read, write, edit, style and share poetry with others.  In doing so, we hope that it might support their literacy engagement and wellbeing.

Indeed poetry provides a relatively condensed, low-time-investment/high-emotional-impact form of literature and overcomes several identified barriers to engaging young people’s literacy.  It may therefore provide one avenue for renewing young people’s literacy practices.

This project is being carried out in collaboration with an app developer (Playable Technology), literacy organisations (National Literacy Trust, Poetry Society, Scottish Poetry Library), and young people who we intend to recruit to coproduce a working prototype of the mobile app.

Principal Investigator: Dr Patrick Errington

Lead Researcher: Simon Boyle

Co-Investigators: Dr Dan Mirman and Dr Sarah McGeown

Project partners: National Literacy Trust, Poetry Society, Scottish Poetry Library, Playable Technology

For more information, please contact the Principal Investigator, Patrick Errington:  p.errington@ed.ac.uk

This project has been funded by Wellcome Trust Institutional Translational Partnership Award (WT iTPA).