DePaul University

During my final year attending DePaul University as a full-time graduate student, I worked for the Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse department as a graduate assistant. In this role I performed a variety of tasks according to the needs of the department and the program director, and I would self-manage my work on the tasks. Some of my responsibilities included:

• Meeting with the program director and three other graduate assistants to discuss progress on our current projects, to receive feedback and input, and to plan for and be assigned upcoming projects
• Writing and research-based tasks, such as writing blog articles, using and maintaining a comprehensive style guide
• Helping to develop a final portfolio requirement for the MA in WRD program by conducting research on portfolios, creating a sample portfolio and facilitating a portfolio workshop
• Transcribing interviews as a research assistant for department faculty

Blog Posts

One of my core responsibilities was to produce content for the WRD blog, the department’s website which is hosted on WordPress. Each time I was assigned a blog article, I would review the criteria for blog post genres in the department’s style guide and look at previously written samples for those genres in order to fit within the expected the organization and format of the content. After that, I would typically do some kind of research before writing.

Researching and Writing Tasks

As an example, these are the kinds of research tasks I performed in order to prepare for a Course Profile article:

• Consult the course syllabus to understand its course outcomes, goals and structure
• Interview the professor to get more information and useful quotes for the article

And these are the tasks I performed to prepare for a Job Sleuth article:

• Identify various professional associations within the given job field
• Identify job boards that contain postings for hiring
• Contact department faculty who may have a connection to the job field to draw on their expertise

In addition to the research and writing, I was also responsible for including multi-modal content such as images and hyperlinks, as well as responding to editorial feedback from the program director.

For a full list of the articles and content I produced see this list of posts filtered by my authorship on the WRD blog. 

Style Guide

Another responsibility I undertook as a graduate assistant was helping to maintain and develop a style guide. The WRD department’s style guide is a living document stored on Google Drive that is regularly updated. It contains a description of the department’s content strategy as well as guidelines for producing and assessing the content of print and digital communication channels. This work of maintaining the style guide is generally unstructured and taken up whenever seen as necessary by a graduate assistant or the program director.

Examples of Style Guide Tasks

• Updating links to sample posts
• Marking policies for review or revision
• Editing sections to keep them relevant and up to date
• Writing new sections and policies, for example, a section on “When to Delete Old Content” and guidelines for Job Sleuth posts

Screenshots of Style Guide Contributions