Context in The Writers' Slate

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.”