About Portfolio
***THIS IS AN OLD SITE. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE MY PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE, PLEASE VISIT WWW.NATALIELIOUNIS.COM***
Over the past few months, I have been a professional writing & editing intern at the West Virginia University Writing Center, where I am also a tutor. I truly enjoy teaching writing and helping students become better writers, but at the root of it, I just love helping people. In my internship, I had the opportunity to combine my tutoring and professional writing & editing skills and my love of helping people.
For my copyediting project, I decided to refine the Writing Center Handout Series, which is a group of useful resources available for tutors and students to reference. Since the series was written by tutors, there were not very many grammatical mistakes. However, as tutors, we are not trained to focus on how papers look; we are trained to focus on the content of papers. As a PWE intern and tutor, I used both sets of skills in copyediting the documents to aid in greater reader comprehension and aesthetics.
This semester, the writing center decided to try out an online scheduling system. At our beginning-of-the-semester meeting, I gave a brief overview of how to use the site, but confusion ensued among my fellow tutors. The solution was for me to create a user manual to guide the tutors through booking appointments. The result was actually two user manuals: one to guide tutors through booking appointments, and another to guide tutors through the administrative site (the master calendar, adding tutors to the roster, etc.).
To keep life interesting and exciting at the writing center, we have what are called “Non-tutoring Initiatives.” One non-tutoring initiative we do is record podcasts for students to access at home. We have podcasts on in-text citations, personal statements, writing professional emails, and more, and they can be downloaded from our website. My job was to promote universal design by writing transcriptions of the podcasts for hearing-impaired students.
My final project was completely unexpected–and it all came about because my boss was expecting! When she came back from maternity leave, she told me that WVU does not have a wheelchair accessible map of campus. This is something that would be useful not only for people in wheelchairs, but also for people who are using crutches, pushing around a stroller, or just carrying a large stack of books. Now WVU has a wheelchair accessible map of campus, powered by Google Maps, complete with pictures and descriptions of where the entrances are located on each building. Of all my projects for my internship, I loved this one the most. I wasn’t doing something for me and for people I know; this time I was doing something for a larger group of people I didn’t know, and I felt even better about the project because of that.
Although my internship did not focus on design work, I chose to include it in my portfolio to show my range of skills. I learned how to use Photoshop in Multimedia Writing, a PWE class, and I learned InDesign from a crash course provided by a graphic design major. I have not done much design work in my academic career, but I am a quick learner, and I am very willing to learn how to become better at designing.
The resounding theme of my internship was being able to help people, so that is what I want to focus on. I argue that writing in its very essence has assisting qualities that help readers. Whether it is a user manual guiding a tutor through the process of canceling an appointment or a research paper informing a reader about stem cell research, the words are there to instill information into a reader’s brain–to help them understand something. To help them.
I have come to identify myself as a professional writer/editor throughout my college years. Further, I have come to identify myself as a helper this semester. Helping people is something I always liked to do and always tried to do, but I never embraced it as an identity. With the realization that writing is helping, however, I already have this identity. I am a writer, therefore I am a helper. My portfolio will support this argument.
Natalie Carpini
natcarpini@gmail.com Continue to Copyediting>
