(This is my output during our workshop. The editors got a lot of observations as to the composition as well as the grammar of this article but I'll have it posted anyway...)

ARE YOU DEPRIVED WITH YOUR RIGHT TO BE HEARD? How far are you willing to go to express your opinion, thoughts and ideas? Will you settle for the local arena or go beyond your boundaries? Do you wish to address your message to the majority or to some selected few? These are challenging questions that each one of us should take into consideration when we want to exercise our freedom of expression.

Expressing our freedom of expression knows no limit. We can go as far as we could imagine, not literally but technically. We can use various forms of medium in sending our message. In return, we can receive feedbacks from the message we sent. That is how communication goes. It is a two-way process. In the communication process, we can either be the sender or the receiver. If the receiver becomes responsive, it could only mean that the message was interesting enough. Otherwise, we need to reconsider the significance of our concerns before sending it out.

We might have that freedom of expression but with that freedom we must have that sense of accountabilities. We are accountable of everything that we said, of every message or opinions that we expressed. We must uphold honesty and integrity for every word that we expressed. That’s real freedom. It is exactly contradicting to what most people believed. Freedom may mean doing things in accordance to our will but its consequence is beyond our control. Of course, no one would wish to spend the rest of their lives behind bars, would you? ETHICS is the keyword for that freedom to be fully exercised.

All these insights I learned not just by merely sitting on the corner and doing nothing, I learned all of these from the two-day seminar workshop in Basic Journalism sponsored by the Corporate Affairs Office of Mindanao University of Science and Technology (MUST). The activity was initiated to equip the university with pool of writers from various departments that will bring the latest updates of the university to the global community.

We have to write to EXPRESS, not to impress. Otherwise, we might end up so depressed.

Happy writing!

I am very much privilege to be a part of the Seminar-Workshop on Basic Journalism initiated by the Office of the Corporate Affairs in our school. It is a two-day workshop pre-loaded with a lot of inputs in journalism. I totally appreciate this kind of activity. Writing has been already a part of me. I've been writing in many forms but honestly I don't have basic knowledge in journalism. Though I am not into news writing but the fact that I did vital documentaries that has something to do with the procurement process, I knew that this one would really be of great help.

Ms. Imma Rae Gatuslao, Chief of the City Information Office (CdeO) was our first lecturer on Writing for University Affairs. I learned a lot from her about corporate communication. I learned that  the corporation's voice and the image it projects should go along well together. We should be able to maintain the integrity by being honest with all our inputs. She emphasized that ETHICS is a necessary component in corporate communication. In writing, we should consider our receiver as part of our constituencies by giving them an appropriate messages through an equally applicable medium that suits their need and situation. 

An effective communication should have the following criteria:

Our lecturer put it simply this way:

Sender --------------->     Message    --------------> Receiver

Medium

after the message was sent through an appropriate media, the receiver may have his feedback which in turn will make the sender as the receiver this time (it's a two way process just as shown on the figure above). The presentation was brief but concise. I also learned about 5Ws and 1H (What, Who, When, Where, Why and How). Informative, indeed!

The second topic was about The Basics of  News Writing  by Mr. Ismael Talili. He gave us our first workshop in straight news writing focusing on our new enrollment system that was recently adopted by the school. After the challenging group activity presentation, a rigid critiquing/editing was done which concluded the first-day session. One powerful point that I learned from his discussion was that, in news writing we should  Keep It Short and Simple (KISS)...

Now, that's what I considered as the essence of journalism!

I am looking forward for another challenging task tomorrow....