In February 2015, the British Council, in partnership with Educate a Girl, hosted a workshop titled, ‘The Use of the Subjective Tense’ with the London based author and journalist, Alex Preston.
Educate a Girl, a Dawood Foundation initiative to empower women through education, allowed us to engage 40 young women for the workshop. Participants were able to explore the voice of the journalist, discussing when and how a writer should employ his or her own perspective in reporting. The emphasis was on understanding how the ‘I’ in reportage can add much more meaning to a piece of work, which would otherwise come across as dry and distant in tone. Through a variety of reading material, the girls also looked at how different subjects and situations demand different levels of engagement and distance on the part of the reporter.
One of the workshop participants, Yusra Rizvi later commented, “The reading material was just perfect as per the theme, Alex Preston is a teacher who can make you imagine not just inside out but also outside in”.