Content Development
As an undergraduate researcher for Crow, a multi-institutional research project on first-year and second-language writing, I contribute to our online presence through social media management and blog posts. For the former, I tweet to provide updates on our progress and share humorous office anecdotes. The latter is more extensive, with blog posts ranging from team member profiles to conference reviews.
During the summer of 2018, I was asked to create content for The Odyssey, an online platform that publishes college students' original writing. I was determined to use this opportunity to promote awareness for topics that I am passionate about. As such, I wrote articles on contemporary social, racial, and environmental issues, ranging from veganism (right) to sustainable fashion to privilege in today's society. Over the span of three months, the twelve articles I wrote reached over 4.9 thousand viewers. These experiences equipped me to utilize SEO for article promotion, practice effective audience analysis, and produce topical and relevant content for the web. |
Project Management
My Professional Writing curriculum has centered heavily on writing effective memos, technical reports, and documentation. I have been able to apply this in my two research projects: one being Crow, and the other an analysis of gendered violence in Victorian literature. At Crow, I write extensive internal documentation for sustainability purposes. I've drafted best practices for information architecture in Google Drive, scripted and recorded a screencast on exporting graphics from Adobe Illustrator, and generated guidelines for future undergraduate researchers. Similarly, I've drafted best practices and project updates for my mentor and fellow researchers in my feminist studies.
Project management requires brief and efficient communication, with extensive documentation to make the process accessible for future team members. Not only have my experiences made me a more succinct technical writer, they have also allowed me to assess and improve my own processes and deliverables for any given project.
Project management requires brief and efficient communication, with extensive documentation to make the process accessible for future team members. Not only have my experiences made me a more succinct technical writer, they have also allowed me to assess and improve my own processes and deliverables for any given project.
Creative Writing
As a young girl, I often wrote picture books and even full-blown novels as gifts for family members when my allowance didn't make the cut. Truthfully, I enjoyed spending time developing characters and plots. Now, with a minor in Creative Writing, I've taken introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses in fiction and poetry, which have taught me techniques for mastering craft elements and literary devices. In my poems and short stories, I tend to merge my own experiences with contemporary issues, addressing such topics as gender inequality, agism, and midwestern urban life.
Integral to Purdue's Creative Writing curriculum are collaborative workshops, in which students provide constructive criticism and feedback on each other's stories. Through these workshops, I've developed a critical yet generous eye. It is easy to find what's "not working" in a piece, but much harder (and more important) to suspend your judgments and take each work on its own terms. As an aspiring Editor, I believe this mindset is essential when it comes to reviewing unsolicited manuscripts and submission.
Integral to Purdue's Creative Writing curriculum are collaborative workshops, in which students provide constructive criticism and feedback on each other's stories. Through these workshops, I've developed a critical yet generous eye. It is easy to find what's "not working" in a piece, but much harder (and more important) to suspend your judgments and take each work on its own terms. As an aspiring Editor, I believe this mindset is essential when it comes to reviewing unsolicited manuscripts and submission.
My Bookshelf
Stephen King's commandment of "Read a lot, write a lot" is one I strongly believe in. The content I produce is inevitably impacted by the authors and poets I'm currently reading. My recent favorites include Human Acts by Han Kang, Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot (who taught my Advanced Fiction Writing seminar here at Purdue), and Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit. As a young woman, I hold these female literary powerhouses in high regard, and aspire to write as honestly, wittily, and vulnerably as they do.
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"Read a lot, write a lot." |