Report on the Prize Giving Ceremony of Your College

An event report follows the order of the event: when and where it was held, who presided and who was chief guest, what happened in sequence, who won what, and how it closed. Names and times are the substance of this kind of report, so a version written without them cannot score well however fluent it is.

The question: Write a report on the prize giving ceremony of your college.

The format

Open with the event, the place and the scale

Name the ceremony, the institution, the day and roughly how many attended, in one sentence. Then who presided and who was chief guest.

• Give a number for the audience.
• Name offices rather than people.
• 🚨 Third person throughout — no we.

Follow the programme in order

An event report is chronological after the lead: opening, recitation, prize distribution, addresses, cultural programme, close. Give the time it began and ended.

• Say how many students received prizes and in what categories.
• One sentence per stage.

Report what was said, briefly

Summarise the chief guest's and the principal's remarks in a sentence each, and end with any announcement made. Announcements are background and belong last.

Model answer

Model answer (about 200 words)

Annual prize giving held at city college

Staff Correspondent

Cumilla, 5 September: The annual prize giving ceremony of Cumilla Government College was held on Thursday at the college auditorium, with about six hundred students, teachers and guardians attending.

The Principal presided over the ceremony, which began at ten in the morning with recitation from the holy scriptures and the national anthem. The Deputy Commissioner of Cumilla attended as chief guest and distributed prizes among seventy-two students who had excelled in the annual examinations, in debate, in sports and in cultural competitions during the year.

Addressing the gathering, the chief guest said that examination results were only one measure of what a college produced, and urged students to take part in debate and sport as seriously as in their studies. The Principal, in his address, thanked guardians for their support and announced that the college would open a new science laboratory in the coming session.

A cultural programme presented by students followed the prize distribution, and the ceremony ended at about one in the afternoon with a vote of thanks from the head of the department of Bengali.

What earns and loses marks

• Give times, numbers and roles: ten in the morning, six hundred attending, seventy-two prize winners, ended at one. An event report without them reads as a summary of what such ceremonies are usually like.
• Put the numbers in the first sentence. A news report leads with how many, where and when; anything else in the opening line is an essay opening in disguise.
• 🚨 Keep yourself out of it. “We should all be careful on the roads” is a sentence from a composition and loses the register mark immediately.
• Attribute every claim you could not have witnessed. Unattributed figures are the clearest sign of an invented report.
• About 180 to 220 words in four short paragraphs is the right length; newspaper paragraphs are short by convention.

Mistakes to avoid

• ✗ We all enjoyed the programme very much and it was a memorable day for our college. ✓ A cultural programme presented by students followed the prize distribution. — a report is third person and carries no personal reaction