Does Twitter matter?

If you haven’t used Twitter, you’re probably wondering what all the hype is about. You post 140 character updates of your life? That sounds banal and narcissistic (even worse than having a blog.) But I gave it a try, and discovered its usefulness, and for the rest of this post, I’m going to explain (in 140 character snippets) why Twitter’s worth your twime (that’s my Twitter word for “time.”)

Remember to read them chronologically, bottom to top.

Happy tweeting.

Help!

Last fall, I was responsible for using Adobe InDesign to create the layout for a magazine project. I'd taken a Photoshop class in 2003, but InDesign is a different monster altogether and requires that one study its features before really using it well.

After creating the layout for four pages of articles, I needed to number the pages. Some other groups talked about how irritating it was to number each page individually, and this got me thinking: if InDesign is a professional quality program, why wouldn't it include a simple feature (page numbering) that even Microsoft Word uses?

I opened the Adobe help in InDesign and, using the search box, I typed in "number pages" and quickly found an article on how to automatically number pages in InDesign. Later, when I needed text to continue from one page to the next, I used the help box again and found the answer.

Here's my point: if you're using a professional program, there is a way for the computer to do a lot of tedious work automatically. That's why computers were invented; why spend hours numbering pages or applying formatting to 60 pages of text when there's an automatic way to do it? If there is something you want to do, try using the help function of a program to figure out how it works. You may need to learn the vocabulary of the program, but that should come more naturally with time. The creators of these professional programs know their reputations are a vital part of their marketing, so if there's not an intuitive way to do something, they'll give their users a way to find out how to do it.

And always, if help fails you, Google is your friend. Guaranteed, someone else on the internet has had your problem before, and it's on Google.

Get a job as a tutor.

I’ve taken nearly every professional writing class on campus (I have one more to go,) but where I really learned the little rules of tech writing was at work. I work at my campus’ writing lab, and since January 2008, my job has required me to review up to 20 student papers daily and give personalized feedback on the biggest way that student can improve his or her paper. This job has required me to learn the parts of speech and rules of grammar, basic formatting for technical documents, various formatting styles (such as MLA, APA, and Chicago,) and basically be able to give meaningful advice on any type of document.

And  because of the experience you gain by teaching the principles of English writing so frequently, you become a master of them yourself. Producing quality documents starts to come fluently and naturally. You recognize the critical mistakes most people make when writing and avoid making them yourself. And you gain the critical ability to review an entire document in a matter of minutes, then identify the areas it needs to develop—a crucial talent for any editor to be.

If you want great experience in refining your editor’s eye, working with clients and giving them feedback, and seeing what mistakes other writers make so you avoid them yourself, find the writing lab on your college’s campus and apply for a job. If your campus doesn’t have a writing lab, find out about becoming a tutor or teaching assistant for an English class.

Internship tip of the day: Intern at home (or with relatives.)

Between the months of September, 2008 and February, 2009, over 2 million people lost their jobs. That’s 16,000 pink slips a day. Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, KB Toy, and even Sharper Image have filed for bankruptcy in recent months.

So with unemployment so high and so many jobs being lost, how is it that undergraduate Matt Hartvigsen was offered a full-time job last fall?

The answer is simple: he went out, found an internship, and made an impression. As English department internship coordinator Dr. Phil Murdock explains, “Most businesses who are cutting back recognize that interns are a relatively inexpensive way to go. They’re looking to hire in the future and they’re probably smart to go through a couple of interns and say, ‘Does this known quantity look better than what we can hire on the open market?’ and it usually does.” A little creativity, resourcefulness, and careful tailoring of experience can make a graduate really stand out in a sea of jobless college alumni.

Here are a few tips to ensure some job options after graduation.

1. Use your family.
“I would say the best city [to intern] would be a city where you could live relatively inexpensively while you intern, and that means sponging off relatives,” says Dr. Murdock. “You got family somewhere, and you look around.”

Many internships won’t pay anything (more on that later.) If you can live for free, you’re more able to take a non-paying internship without it destroying your finances.

Matt Hartvigsen found his internship through a family friend. At the time, his girlfriend (now fiancée) moved to Provo. He decided to do an internship in the area. “When I finally figured out that I wanted to do an internship, I knew one professor at BYU. I went to that one English professor, who’s a good family friend of ours, and says, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on in my life: I’m chasing this girl, and to make this legit and feel like I’m also progressing in school and career. I need an internship.’ She says, ‘I know two people’ and she gave me their names.”

Matt’s family connection didn’t provide him a place to live, but it did lead him to his internships.

2.    Create your own internship.
New York and LA aren’t the only places to intern. In fact, the best place to find an internship may not be where an internship is even being offered.

“Go to the internet, type in ‘internship’ and ‘English’ (for example,) and find a few sample internships,” Dr. Murdock advises. “You might find the Fish and Game for some state actually has a position.” Instead of applying for that internship, find a local Fish and Game, write an internship proposal for them, and make a query phone call.  “You create an internship and no one is applying.  The one on the internet has 500 applicants. This has no applicants but is created from your research.”

3.    Work for free.
While Matt completed his internships last fall, he worked as a baker in the morning and interned during his afternoons. He needed a part time job to give him any source of income: his internships were unpaid.

“I found a cheap place to live, as economical as I could,” Hartvigsen says. Many great internship opportunities don’t pay anything. Being willing to work for free opens up your options. “You’re probably gonna have to take what you can get,” says Hartvigsen. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t jockey for better stuff.” He says that if he had started looking for internships earlier, he probably could have found a paid opening, but he’s still grateful for the benefits he received from his internship.

“I’m really grateful that I did my internships because I feel like it gave me a new outlook on school as well as confidence to go out into the work field. Don’t look at ‘em as a check-off item, but more of a building experience for life and making the transition into the workplace.”

4.    Know the market.
Blindly jumping into the job market with only the experience your degree offered won’t set you above the rest of the applicants. This is where career fairs come in. “Career fairs are really useful for asking lots of intelligent questions,” says Dr. Murdock. “In terms of interviewing stuff, they’re only useful when you’re ready, but it’s really useful when you walk around and ask the people questions.” A computer major may ask the companies what kind of software they use, whether they use open or closed source code, if they use InDesign or Quark, what way the industry is going, or a dozen other questions that would give you a better understanding of how to prepare.

Learning about the market may also make you aware of available career paths. “You really end up determining which way you’re going to ski down the mountain,” says Dr. Murdock. “You’re a writer but you realize there’s a whole bunch of writing coming out of medical areas. So if you were to see that, you might say, ‘You know, I might wanna jump over and pick up a couple of health or medical classes so that I could talk fluently about major kinds of issues. In addition to general writing, I might even mark myself as a health writer.’” Communication majors can create a niche for themselves in technology, or business majors a niche in exercise science.

5.    Gain experience and tailor your résumé.
While Dr. Murdock was working on his Master’s degree, he realized that the experience from his degree alone would not prepare him for the competitive market.

“I was in graduate school getting a literary degree and started to look at what’s going to happen. I saw that with a bachelor’s degree I’m not going to get any career track in a university. Master’s students are going to community college. When you look at what community college professors are doing, they’re teaching remedial English. We had no classes, no preparation whatsoever for that.” Dr. Murdock found a local vocational school and volunteered to go work in the reading and writing lab. “There I just picked everybody’s brains on how to give standardized tests and how to tutor, and I suddenly had this whole new section on my résumé that I created.”

His experience volunteering paid off. When he interviewed for a teaching job in Virginia, the interviewer asked, “You are a Mormon white boy from out west and we’re an inner-city school that has blacks. What makes you think you can teach inner-city blacks standard white dialect?” Dr. Murdock replied, “You know, that’s a great question because I’ve never done it. I have, however, taught Navajo Indians standard white dialect and I’ll betcha their core language is further from white dialect than what you’ve got.”

Don’t start thinking about a job only after you graduate. Get experience and an internship early. You’re paying for an education anyway—why not pay less than tuition to live somewhere and do an internship? With a dedicated, smart effort, graduation doesn’t have to mean unemployment.

And if all else fails, at least liquidation companies are hiring.

Schedule a set time.

I came across an article on the Study Hacks blog about setting a time and place to write. There is a lot of great info about how to set a writing schedule on that blog—definitely worth a read—and it got me thinking about my own habits and the habits of the other writers I know. Here’s what’s worked for me and other students from my classes in maximizing our effective writing time.

1. Write at the same time every day.  By doing this, you’re training your mind to start thinking at the same time daily, so it will start to give you ideas and produce creativity at the same daily time. This is a lot more convenient than having epiphanies at 4 in the morning when you’re in bed.
   
   
2. Be consistent in your environment. This is kind of like the previous item. You’re training your brain to say, “Oh, this is where I write. I should get ready to produce now. Good plan.” Whether it’s an office, the kitchen table, or a desk in your bedroom, pick a consistent place to write so your mind associates that place with writing.
   
   
3. Avoid distractions. Don’t go on Facebook. Don’t check your e-mail every 20 minutes. And don’t play around too much with your iTunes playlist. All of these things whittle away your time and mental resources and are more exhausting than they should be. If you need something going on in the background (I used to have a movie playing while I wrote; some people need music playing,) start it, and then get to writing.
   
   
4. Keep an idea notebook with you at all times. This tip isn’t so much about your writing time as it is incredibly practical. All the great writers have some way to write down the ideas that come to them about their writing during the day. Sometimes, you’re eating bad Chinese food from the student food court and you get an idea for a story. Unless you’re gifted with an exceptionally great memory (I’m not,) then having something to write on will save you later from the frustration of a missed idea.
   
   
5. Take breaks to stretch every hour or so. Sometimes I like taking a walk to get the old mind cleared. I’m a kinesthetic learning and need to move my large muscle groups. It gets me thinking. Sometimes other people don’t learn this way, though, and don’t need to move as much as I do. Still, it’s good to stretch and walk around a bit so your muscles don’t get cramped.

Have any ideas that work for you? Let me know in the comments for this post.

Write what’s fun.

I read this article on Men with Pens about how many people don’t end up working in the field they studied in college. Here’s the section that pulled me in:

You might think your degree has absolutely nothing to do with your current job, or maybe you feel it’s not very helpful to your career or even the slightest bit useful. Even Taylor, a Men with Pens copywriter, doesn’t really think she gets much out of her college degree when she does her job.

And she has a degree in ENGLISH, for Pete’s sake.

You might have a degree in archaeology and now you write code for a living. You might have your degree in biology and now you knit fuzzy hats for babies. Or you got your degree in comparative religion and now you write a blog about snow sports.

I guarantee that if you think hard about it, you can find a way that your degree applies to your current career – and if you do think hard about it, I guarantee you’ll get a lot more out of your hard-won knowledge.

Students of professional or technical writing have a lot of different options to continue their educations when they graduate with an undergraduate degree. Go to law school? Teach high school? Get a Master’s Degree? Or find an editing job?

But life happens, and so what if you don't get into the grad schools you applied for when you graduate? What will you do for a year and a half of your life until you can apply again?

A great backup plan is to find a job doing some sort of writing-related job for a year. As I mentioned in a previous post, the best way to get a job is to intern. And the best place to intern is close to home. Since I’m from Los Angeles, that’s a good option. I’ve also got people I can live with in the Salt Lake area.

But after reading this article, I’m reminded of something a professor once told me. Dr. Phil Murdock, the professor I interviewed in the article about internships, said to write about what you love. Have a hobby in computers and technology? Try to get an internship with a computing magazine. Interested in the medical field? Find an internship writing copy for a hospital or medical clinic.

When you write what you love, you put more effort into your work and the quality shows. If you want to really “wow” an employer, find an internship you can love.

Create your online presence: Building blog cred.

Last time I wrote about how to become an “expert” blogger. Really, it’s a war of attrition: if you have 100 blog posts over a year or a year and a half, that’ll give you the credibility you want. But there are thousands, if not millions of bloggers populating the Web 2.0 blogosphere. Sure, you can always put your blog on your resume, but how do you stand out so that people actually care what you have to say?

To offer a solution to this problem, I’ve decided to use the acronym CFC to describe actions you can take to build your Web cred. I know it’s not a perfect acronym to use because of the whole global warming thing, but here’s what I’ve come up with: just like how CFCs are affecting the atmosphere, you’ll be affecting the blogosphere.

I know, it’s a crummy analogy. But bear with me.

Consistency
Be consistent in posting. Post two or three times a week, and you’ll have 100 posts in a year. Post blog entries with consistent themes. Consistently have guest bloggers post little entries on your blog. Write consistently well. Consistently read other good blogs, and consistently have friends give you constructive criticism on your writing.

Following
Publicly follow the blogs you read, and make comments on the posts you read. Here’s why this is important: when people comment on my blog, I notice them. If you’re writing a public blog, that means that your writing is meant to be read, and when you get those indicators that people are reading and thinking about your work, it feels good. Just like how you’d enjoy sincere and thought-filled comments on your blog, the bloggers you read feel the same. And often, when you follow them and actively comment on their blogs, they’ll take a look at your blog and comment there. If you’ve got good content, they’ll recommend your blog to their own blogging buddies. It’s like how Ellen DeGeneres follows several Twitter accounts of her own readers every week. Bloggers love celebrity, and they might even bounce some of it back to you if you stand out as a solid follower.

Cooperate
Find friends in your major who are also blogging and encourage them. Follow each other. Comment on each other’s blogs. Write guest posts for each other. This is the networking age, and finding success today is dependent on who you know. If you help out your fellow bloggers, they’ll help you and put in a good word for you when they have success. It all comes around.