My job title is Technical/Professional Writing Intern for
Women Helping Women of Southeast Kansas. My responsibilities include attending
monthly board meetings where I take the minutes. I also meet with my supervisor
to be assigned tasks. I help maintain spreadsheets of volunteers and donors. I
helped design an ad campaign for a Men’s Auxiliary. I also design small flyers
for different holidays throughout the year to encourage donations.
Required qualifications would definitely be organization.
Working with a new and inexperienced organization involves a lot of trial and
error. I need to stay very organized or I will fall behind. Another would be
creativity. It is very important to have a creative side to designing ad
campaigns in order to draw in contributors.
Preferred qualifications would be grammar and editing
skills. Though these skills are not directly used, i.e. editing papers, they
are very helpful in writing quality text on flyers. These skills are also handy
when helping the Board write grant proposals.
Some of the skills I have learned in my internship are
professional skills. I have learned how to work with an organization,
particularly one that is charitable. I have learned how to work in a team and
accomplish an important goal.
Some skills I have practiced are both my technical writing
and creativity. I am a creative writer so I have never had any trouble with
being creative. I have been able to practice writing for a more professional
scenario, which has been very helpful for my future. I have gotten to flex my
creative mind when working on flyers and ad campaigns. I want to do more than
make something look pretty—I want it to make an impact on the community.
I thought that I would use my editing skills more, but I
have not. The organization is so new that they do not have an extensive amount
of text that needs to be edited.
Writing and working for this internship is very different
than writing for school. For instance, writing for WHW is very important
because women’s lives are at stake. They have very little, and our organization
provides they with necessary help. In that case, the writing we do is important
in gaining donations to help these women. When writing for school, I am writing
for myself and a good grade.
I have three different writing contexts for my internship. I
write in persuasive prose (such as flyers) to attract donors. I use a more
technical style for writing grant proposals, and I use a more familiar tone
with in-house communication. As Lee Odell says in “Relations between Writing
and Social Context”, “The chief value of context is its usefulness in
explaining the types of meanings writers attempt to express, and readers expect
to interpret, in specific situations.” So I use different types of writing for
different audiences and situations.
My work atmosphere is very informal. Much of our
communication is done through Facebook or around a dinner table. We have people
of many different backgrounds present which sometimes makes communication more
difficult. Anson and Forsberg say, “An excellent way in which to understand the
role of such conditions and their influence on the writing process is to study
what happens when members of one discourse community begin to write in another,
relatively unfamiliar way.” For example, we have people with graphic design,
law, English, and administrative backgrounds, all of which require different
styles of writing so we must work together to form a more cohesive system of
communication.
The organizational hierarchy is as follows:
Co-Presidents
Board Members
Members
Volunteers
Recipients
As I explained, each group requires a different style of
writing. “In contrast to literary or cognitive perspectives, social approaches
to writing are interested in the relationship among writers, texts, and their
surrounding context,” (Faigley, Cherry, Jollifee, & Skinner, 1985).
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