Some institutions choose to mention student's parents in their achievements. Including parents helps drive home the local aspect of the story to the media. This page provides some tips and tricks for including them in your Merit achievements.
Students' Parents
To build a reference to students' parents into your story, you'll need to add a column to your spreadsheet called [Parent Names]. Here are a few ways you can work this information into your template:
- [John] [Smith], the child of [Tom and Jane Smith], of [Albany].
- [John] [Smith], is the child of [Albany] residents [Tom and Jane Smith].
Son/Daughter/Child
In the example above, the word "child" is built into the sentence. We recommend doing this to avoid potential gender misuse in your achievement. However, if you're certain of your students' gender identity, you can customize your story further by including a column for the students' [Relationship] to their parents. Here's an example:
- [John] [Smith] is the [son] of [Albany] residents [Tom and Jane Smith].
- [Nancy] [Smith] is the [daughter] of [Albany] residents [Tom and Jane Smith].
- [Casey] [Smith] is the [child] of [Albany] residents [Tom and Jane Smith].
Separated Parents
In some instances, your students will have multiple sets of parents. Including multiple sets of parents in a story is possible with a little bit of work. In order to do this, you'll need four separate columns in your spreadsheet for [Parent Names 1], [Parent City 1], [Parent Names 2] and [Parent City 2]. Not all students will have separated parents, so include the word "and" in the [Parent Names 2] column, and the word "of" in the [Parent City 2] column. Here's an example:
- [John] [Smith] is the child of [Tom and Jane Smith] of [Albany] [and George Smith] [of Boston].
Alternatively, you could put all of your parent text into one [Parent Details] column. That column should include the names of each parent as well as their hometowns.
- [Smith] is the child of [Tom and Jane Smith of Albany and George Smith of Boston].