interview summary

My interview with Dr. Rachel Young went really well. She gave me really good answers and she gave me a nonacademic source. Dr. Young has been a professional in the journalism field for almost 20 years, since she got her Master's degree in 2000. She usually spends a few hours a day writing prepared pieces, but unprepared writing takes up much more of her time. As a teacher she writes a ton of class pieces, like notes, exams, and contact with students. Her most common form of writing is emails and research papers. She has to write in many different genres for her job, such as emails to colleagues versus emails with students, research writing, and journalistic articles. She has to consider the many different audiences that she's targeting in her different writings, and that will change her tone and diction based on who she's writing to. Her hardest piece of writing was her first academic research paper. Before then she had focused mainly on nonacademic journalistic articles, so making such a drastic change was difficult. It took her over a year to write, and several years to revise. Her high school was really focused on developing writing skills, so she felt very prepared for writing in her field. Dr. Young wishes that she knew in the beginning that writing doesn't start out very good, but gets better over time. It doesn't mean that you're a bad writer, it just needs to be revised. She worked on features and arts & entertainment at a newspaper while she was in school. She got a lot of freedom, but wishes she had more direction. She wished that she had a good editor to help her along. She also worked in a children's magazine and wrote articles from the perspective of a cartoon mouse. For academic writing, her time frame is usually around a year.