Being a technical writing related intern creates an employee with the ability to work within their authority to create, edit, and interact effectively. This helps combat some of the issues Susan Katz outlines for interns trying to learn about their position and how they can best understand their authority, ability to enact change and input their ideas, and their own real job responsibilities. I am an assistant editor for The CEA Forum. I post to The CEA and The CEA Forum’s Facebook pages with articles for readers pertaining to higher education and pedagogy that they can find interesting or helpful to their own teaching styles and experiences. I also observe the processes on The CEA Forum’s website, at https://journals.tdl.org/ceaforum, for the flow of processes that users, authors, and anyone else may interact with to use the site, interact with others on it, or submit to the journal. Then, once articles are submitted and reviewed, I help proof read them again for the authors’ record and format them to the journal’s style guide for continuity, using InDesign to create an easy to read and access PDF.
For this position, an incoming intern would need the base knowledge of technical writing for writing formal documents for The CEA Forum’s use or for sending out to authors, reviewers, and readers. The assistant editor intern needs to have a good hold on editing, obviously, so they can edit different genres of writing and edit or rework ideas for The CEA Forum’s website, journal, and current issue being created. Also a working knowledge of InDesign would be beneficial for any intern when they are formatting articles to match the stylesheet.
In this internship I have flexed a lot of my real core technical writing skills that do not often get exercise in a lot of other classes. That has helped me keep my knowledge of document design and writing style, like guides found in The Chicago Manual of Style that I used in a previous technical editing class, current and effective in the workplace. A lot of my experiential learning was similar to Anson and Forberg’s topic of study of interns. They examined interns to learn more about
“how writers in a new context perceive and adapt to complex and unfamiliar audiences, how they learn to use the language of the workplace, how they make connections and distinctions between experiential and academic learning, how they describe the influence of context on their texts, how they revise those texts, and what motivates those revisions” (Anson, Forsberg 207).
I learned about my new environment and how to interact within it in a new context outside of previous classroom learning. It has been a process involving new kinds of documents and unknown territory, learning through trial and error from an editing standpoint. I found myself studying these same topics in myself to further understand how to tackle new projects. I had to learn about how to interact with previously written documents, and that actually helped a great deal with understanding the level of formality in the language and how to match new documents to that conversation style, getting the message across quickly and without unnecessary fluff, while still being accessible to the interests of someone checking their email. The academic to to professional writing shift that Anson and Forberg discuss was an obvious hurdle. There is a difference even between writing for a hypothetical professional prompt in a class and writing for an actual audience of professional adults whom one could immediately assume hold a higher ability out of lack of confidence in a new environment. That writing, however, has been more doable than I feared before coming into this internship.
I thought I would have to converse more with authors and reviewers, but solicitation email attempts are a gamble for responses, and the issue itself does not require a lot of correspondence until final review with the authors for confirmation for the issue. But I have still done a large amount of writing for this internship. Distinct genres of writing for specific purposes and a communicative work environment helped me understand what was required of me and my work to help me be and feel successful in my contributions to the organization.
Susan Katz, “A Newcomer Gains Power: An Analysis of the Role of Rhetorical Expertise”
Chris Anson and Lee Forsberg, “Moving Beyond the Academic Community: Transitional Stages in Professional Writing”
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