Ladies and gentlemen, we have our winner/s of the cmonionline essay competition week 2. The winning essay is “Effect Of Foreign Debts On Nigeria’s Infrastructural Development by Oyinola Abosede” Oyinola introduced his topic well by incorporating a personal account of his interaction with a public official on the subject matter. He then developed it with sound arguments giving examples with relevant statistics and facts to emphasize the points raised. He concluded by making suggestions. His diction, syntax, punctuation and paragraphing were equally good. Congratulations to Oyinola for winning the N10,000:00 cash prize. You wrote in last time and improved this time to nick the 1st position. You can be proud of your essay and we certainly look forward to more entries from you. The publisher has also awarded N5,000:00 cash prize each to encourage the two other writers that made the top 3. How Nigerians Chose Big Brother Naija Over The Presidential Election by Aaron Livingstone.      2. Letter From The Future by Folarin Oluwatimilehin. While Aaron wrote in for the first time, Folarin is a previous winner and has once again shown that he is a talent to look out for. We are glad and honoured to encourage both of them in their writing journey. Congratulations guys. For obvious reasons, we had more entries than in the 1st week out of which 10 good essays were published. The others didn’t make our editorial standards for various reasons already listed here. Furthermore, as this is a collective learning process we will now be providing some tips from the judges’ feedback. This week we noted that the grading rubric across various disciplines particularly in Africa often attach more weight to content since English isn’t our mother tongue. Moreover, it can be argued that diction or language is about communicating effectively and not necessarily precisely. Yet adequate emphasis must be laid on good grammar, syntax and punctuation especially in creative writing, prose, poetry where style is crucial to evocation which is at the core of that literary genre. Thus our editorial standard is such that we ALWAYS trash any work dotted with red lines leaving no option to ascertain its contents. So please always double-check your grammar and punctuation. Also, endeavour to read the instructions carefully to enhance your chances of winning. Provide a short bio and a bright pic within the recommended size (Oyinola Abosede take note). Caption your essay in your own words. We provide topics, not titles. This exercise is a journey to create a unique audience of not just writers but readers and thinkers. We wish to thank everyone for their support especially our judges and sponsors. And once again congratulations to our writers and readers. We have taken off well and will even get better. Please remember that we are all winners!