Giving an opportunity for MPSPC faculty and staff to be provided with the fundamental skills in writing articles that bear an MPSPC trademark, the Management Information System (MIS) Unit in partnership with the Teacher Education Department conducted a writing workshop for MPSPC potential writer-contributors at the Administration Conference Hall on November 6, 2019.
The workshop also aimed at providing writer-contributors fundamental and advanced skills in articles for the official College Administration publication – the Road Roller. In addition, the workshop also aimed to uphold a culture of “excellent writing” among the faculty and the non-teaching staff.
“The challenge on the lack of skilled writers persists, let alone committed and dedicated writers who could express themselves through sensible and judicious write-ups to continually develop and sustain an open communication with the academe’s clientele and stakeholders through a well-established and well-balanced media and information outlet is what we are addressing,” thus stated Dr. Mark Preston Lopez, TED Chairperson and one of the resource speakers during the workshop who discussed News-Feature writing and “Writing with a Twist”.
Dr. Annie Grail F. Ekid, VPRDE, served as the other resource speaker who tackled Feature and Opinion Writing. Dr. Ekid emphasized in her talk feature writing requires writers to play with words to ensure that they provide readers with descriptions that illustrate mental pictures out of words. In addition, she also stressed that opinion writing must be strongly built on the writers’ ability to be critical of issues that they chose to discuss.
During the afternoon session, Mr. Elvin Rosario, MIS Director presented the selected written outputs of participants from both campuses, while Dr. Ekid and Dr. Lopez evaluated the write ups. Most of the participants showed evidence of their potential to become effective writers of feature, news-feature, and opinion. In fact, the evaluators expressed that the faculty and staff are more articulate in writing opinions than the 2 other genres. This was evident from their written outputs which centered on the most controversial issues in the College like wearing of uniforms, the biometric system, and many more. A follow-up workshop to focus on an advanced level of writing shall follow.
“The skills of the participants may not be developed over night nor over a period of two years, yet, first-hand experiences may potentially nurture these skills for them to write across different genres and that they can gradually unleash their abilities until the time that writing becomes effortless,” Dr. Lopez ended. // Management Information System Unit.
