College Grad Lessons

Today is the official launch of Twenty-Something Writers. The blog/community is a new place for twenty-something writers to talk about their ideas and get inspired. For the blog’s first post, Ashley asked readers to respond to the following prompt:

Tell us about your writing history. Have you always enjoyed writing? Did you hate grammar lessons in school? Who have been your greatest influences? What kind of writing do you enjoy most? Take any creative spin you want. Post your response on your blog and leave the link in the comments below. Check out the responses of others as well.

As a kid, I loved to read and write. Thinking back to my childhood I remember the constant ideas I had for poems, stories, plays and movies. Summers at my grandparents’ farm meant the annual cousin play, written and directed by me of course. I was the oldest cousin, so the role was somewhat logical, but I’m also pretty sure I was a bit obnoxious as a kid. Either way, I miss the creativity that I had as a kid. I didn’t hesitate to fill notebooks with the beginnings of novels. Unfortunately they were always left unfinished, but always because I had a new idea.

In high school, I lost the time for creative writing because I was so busy with writing essays for school, playing sports and participating in other extracurricular activities. I did enjoy writing essays for some classes, but the forced nature of writing about a topic that didn’t excite me and the volume of essays I had to write for school led me to drift away from writing in my free-time. During college I continued to drift away from writing in my free-time and I found that I wrote papers less often than in high school, even though the papers were more substantial. Plus, I was an Economics major, so I developed a much more straight-forward, business style of writing.

College did introduce me to public relations through an internship in the college’s PR office and later as the Director of Publicity for the Student Government Association (SGA). This resparked my interest in writing and gave me a new motivation to write. It helped me realized that writing skills are a great asset to have when looking for a job. A well-written press release or an engaging SGA newsletter could make a big impact on the success of an event or whether the campus community was informed about a controversial issue. This experience combined with the web design skills I picked up at another on-campus internship helped me land a post-graduation digital public affairs internship at a top PR firm in DC. Although I ended up going back to the college’s web team for my first full-time job, the PR firm taught be all about blogging and social networking beyond Facebook.

My current relationship with writing revolves around the technical writing I do for the web team and the blogging I do here. At work, I write training manuals, style guides and newsletters for the Content Management System training program. I absolutely think that my confidence as a technical writer stems from the creative writing that I did as a child. Blogging has helped me develop a more casual style of writing that complements my technical writing and gives me practice writing for a different type of audience. I didn’t realize that basic writing skills could be applied to so many careers, but I am glad that I started practicing at a young age.

With Twenty-Something Writers, I hope to find inspiration to expand the types of writing projects that I pursue and share insight/tips about writing in the workplace.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Finding a Job, Life, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.