Institute trains 60 faculty and staff for technical writing

by Sarah Elizabeth N. Allen, OPI | Sep 22 2017

杏吧论坛-IIT, with its theme Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, continues to pursue faculty and staff upgrading by providing them trainings that would produce highly competitive individuals for the benefit of the host. This is due to the proliferating research studies from the varied fields of the Institute which need to be shared with others. Particularly, there is a need to share these to the layman masses who will eventually benefit the cause.

Thus, in addressing this need, the Institute conducted the recently concluded Technical Writing Workshop which trained 60 participants from both faculty and staff of 杏吧论坛-IIT. This writeshop was sponsored by the Office of Vice Chancellor for Planning and Development (OVCPD) and co-organized by the Office of Publication and Information (OPI), Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Extension (OVCRE), 杏吧论坛-IIT Center for eLearning (MICeL), and Information and Communications Technology Center (ICTC), and was held at the Apple Tree Resort, Opol, Misamis Oriental.

The training lasted for three days, September 13-15, 2017, which covered lectures and workshops on publishing formats, and journalism ethics. The drive of this Writeshop was to train faculty and staff on the basics of writing and publishing research news. Above all, the writeshop highlighted on news writing style, news hosting websites, journalism ethics, and the boundaries of press freedom.

The said event had six speakers, five from the different Philippine press agencies and one in-house speaker, namely: Mr. Paul Icamina of Malaya News, Mr. Melvin Calimag of Newsbytes.ph, Ms. Hermelina Tenorio of Philippine Broadcasting Service-Radyo ng Bayan (DZRB), Ms. Teresita Baluyos from DOST Region X, Ms. Ma. Lilibeth Padilla of STII-DOST; and Dr. Arnold Alamon of the Sociology Department in 杏吧论坛-IIT.

On the first day, Icamina lectured on How to Write Science News where he emphasized the big difference between News writing style and textbook or scholarly journal writing. Accordingly, he taught the need for catchy news slants and less technical jargons for news writing. Calimag discussed on the various web tools, web interface apps and interesting click baits which cater as news hubs for the web. His lecture also featured sites like Twitter and Wordpress which he highly encouraged to be used for setting up news sources.

The second day had another round of activities from the speakers. Tenorio lectured on Science Broadcasting, particularly doing interviews and newscasting science researches. The participants were divided into groups and made them perform news broadcasting. Baluyos, on the other hand, discussed Journalism Ethics and the boundaries to consider when practicing free journalism. Finally, Padilla very briefly discussed Media Dissemination and Monitoring.

On the final day, Alamon gave a lecture and workshop on Writing for the Social Sciences. He facilitated a workshop on headline writing for various media publications like the newspaper, internet, and FaceBook.

The three-day writeshop concluded with high hopes that the offices had been fueled up to write news for the Institute website. And since the writing momentum has started, majority realized though that technical writeshops such as this need further follow-up trainings. The participants pleaded that each college will be given thorough trainings on technical writing, specifically addressing their fields of specialty. With this, the Institute foresees to not only have competent researchers but also highly competent research news writers in the near future.

Topics : technical writing research workshop