The home of writing: Journalism Workshop

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling "Eat, Pray, Love" gave us a hint on where our home is: that something you love more than you love yourself. Just like Elizabeth, writing has always been my home, and I am more than willing to share my writing to anyone who's willing to learn. I have been requested to conduct a five-day workshop on Journalism writing to both teachers and students in my alma mater Mercedarian School, which started last Friday. I was honored to give something back to my elementary school and was more than willing to teach the teachers and students there.

I was informed that the writing skills of both the teachers and students should be honed better for them to develop critical thinking and apt writing and comprehension skills, and so I started with the basics of writing and composition and paragraph writing. It was good enough that the teachers were very inquisitive and proved that they want to improve their writing skills by volunteering their answers every time I gave them an activity on writing. The school's guidance counselor, Mr. Ted asked very good questions that went beyond critical thinking. Other teachers raised questions and gave good answers whenever I asked them to prove their answers to my questions. 

The third leg of the workshop will be on letter writing which is very essential for the students for they shall write request letters, business letters and the like all through out high school and college. Finally for the Journalism club, the fourth and fifth lectures will be on Article writing which includes news, features, sports and editorial writing, and lay-outing and designing of a mini newspaper or newsletter.

I would not have shared this knowledge to my alma mater and to the teachers and students if not for my good foundation and training under Ms. Josephine Bonsol, school paper adviser of LHS Courier in Lagro High School who also graduated at UP Diliman and continues to write in her blog www.jobonsol.net. She has been my mentor since second year high school and I keep coming back to sit in her classes in Journalism every now and then.