Writing with purpose: Siana Bangura
Today was an especially interesting day as we got to meet Creative Entrepreneur Siana Bangura, a poet, journalist and blogger who came in to talk to us about writing the clauses for our Magna Carta 2.0.
Siana didn’t hold back on the inspiring words as she encouraged us to unapologetically speak up on issues important to us, as well as discussing with us the influence that media has on getting your voice heard. This sparked an insightful conversation on how to best use different mediums to project ideas or fight for whatever social justice issue that you want to support.
This was followed by talking about the individual clauses that we would put in our Magna Carta 2.0, alongside a spoken word by Janache (a young man doing the 'What a Liberty!' project too). We all spent time trying to refine each clause, keeping them concise and compact while retaining the bigger meaning behind each statement; not an easy task!
This method of refinement played very nicely into our next activity which was looking at how to effectively edit written text. Vicky, who is Sub-Editor at Index On Censorship’s in house magazine helped us with the process of cutting out unnecessary words in order to get a more sound and consistent sentence structure. As frustrating it was to miss mistakes such as "armed gunmen" (can you spot what's unnecessary about that phrase?) and the use of both either and or in the same sentence, the group activities were enjoyable and very useful.
Overall I think everyone got a lot out of today. With really good advice and tips on avoiding stupid mistakes, not only did it make writing the clauses easier, but it should also help with future parts of the project such as writing for this website and when we expand our use of media to promote our Magna Carta 2.0 online.
