Recently updated on September 19th, 2018 at 10:29 pm
Enilolobo Elijah of Vetland Junior Grammar School, Ifako-Ijaiye and Aderoju Precious of Angus Memorial High School, Somolu have emerged as the overall winners in the Junior and Senior categories respectively in the 2018 Lagos State Essay Competition.
The competition, which took place at the Adeyemi Bero Auditorium in Alausa with the topic – “Lagos: A State of Excellence Indeed” – drew participants from all public schools in the State and produced 96 competitors who participated in the finals from the six Education Districts.
Speaking on behalf of the Deputy Governor, Dr. Idiat Oluranti Adebule, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education, Mrs. Adebunmi Adekanye commended the competitors for their brilliance and articulate delivery.
She expressed excitement that the competition, which aimed at sharpening the writing skills of the students and by implication improving their scores in the English Language in Local and External Examinations, was achieving the desired goals.
Adebule observed that the participants displayed “the gift of deep thought and articulate writing skills to convey ideas, communicate philosophy, recall occurrences and peep into the future as required in literary works”.
She stated further that the competing scripts showed improvement in the four key criteria determining the richness of an essay and the grading which, according to her, is what the government was promoting by the annual essay competition.
Mrs. Marrion Babs-Akinyeye, stated that the last edition of the Lagos State Essay Competition revealed that while the essays were rich in content, well organised and expressed in carefully chosen words, mechanical accuracy was lacking in the writing style of contestants.
Mrs. Babs-Akinyeye said that to reverse that trend, a training workshop was organised by the Ministry for English Teachers “to retrain them in essay writing so that they will know what to look out for in an essay and also guide their students on how to write better essays and score better grades”.
