The
Writers’ Slate is an online journal that publishes narration, expository,
and poetry pieces for students in grades K-12. As an intern for The Writers’ Slate, I work with Dr.
Franklin, the publication’s volunteer editor. As the only intern, I act as a liaison
between student writers and the Slate team,
assistant editor, and journal designer. Although not required for this
internship, it is expected that future interns share an interesting in reading
and writing, as much of the beginning work for the Slate involves reading student work with Professor Franklin in
order to choose submissions for publication.
Because most of this requires
meeting one-on-one with Professor Franklin, interns must be able to successfully
meet deadlines and communicate with Professor Franklin; much of the
communication for this internship is via email, so candidates must be able to
communicate effectively and professionally in an online atmosphere. Students
must also be motivated to work toward a deadline and think creatively to
overcome issues within the publication: not all students that are chosen for
publication are receptive to online communication, so problem solving skills
are essential to a candidate’s success. Because
technology is constantly evolving, making this online communication much more
prevalent, future interns would benefit well from reading Linda Driskill’s
article “Understanding the Writing Contexts in Organizations.” As she states in
her article, online communication relies heavily on the ability to adapt “:namely,
that today’s ever-advancing technology and ever-expanding intercultural
population calls for empathy, understanding, and adaptation when communicating.”
It is becoming increasingly more common for student interns to interact with students
from across the globe—we’ve had submissions from China, Brazil, and India this
year alone. In this internship, interns must pay close attention to context.
Context in The Writers’ Slate internship communication is extremely important.
Because we communicate with a wide variety of people—the Slate director, Professor Franklin, students, and our web mistress—we
must keep in mind that our context depends on the person with whom we are
communicating. According to Driskell, “Context can help explain what a document
means, what ideas it contains, why the writer would try to express his or her
ideas in a particular way, and why readers who occupy particular roles in
different parts of an organization would be likely to respond to a document in
particular ways” (59). As such, we as interns should tailor our method of
communication depending on who we are talking to. Although we need to maintain
and air of professionalism, we must also be able to communicate with students
in a way that they will understand, which is much different than our
communication with both Professor Franklin and Dr. Bushman.
Similarly,
our hierarchy is simple, and we work closely with Professor Franklin. Although
similar to the assignments that we complete in class, we also have the
additional task of balancing formality with our superiors. It is often easy to
slip into a too-comfortable feeling when working with them, because interns seek
advice and input from our supervisor. However, it is important to also remember
that our supervisor is not just our supervisor for the project, but also a
professor and professional in the department. As such, Professor Franklin is
afforded a certain level of respect that interns must provide him. Developing
professional communication in the internship with the Slate is also good practice for the future; careers will always require
workers to be able to communicate professionally, effectively, and efficiently,
which the Slate gives interns the
opportunity to do.
The
only skills that I expected to use that I didn’t were web design. I thought
that I would also be in charge of placing the Slate online, but we have a web mistress who does that for us. I
also thought I would use more aspects of document design. While I did use some
in this internship, I did not really start exercising it until the spring
contest edition, because all the other editions followed a template. Once I was
able to begin designing my edition, I was able to work on skills that I was not
comfortable using before, like creating vector images in Adobe Illustrator.
Sources
Driskill, Linda. “Understanding the Writing Contexts in
Organizations.”
