Write. Edit. Repeat.

Posted February 14, 2014 by Emily Boyd

I started writing this blog just over a year ago, right as I started at GSLIS. When I had been a prospective student I enjoyed reading the posts of current students and was happy to be able to contribute experiences when I became a student. Lately I’ve been happier than ever that I got involved outside of classes in the form of this blog because my job is requiring a lot of writing.

When I first started writing blog posts that would be posted at the end of the week I would write an outline one day, a first draft the next day and edit a third day before finally submitting. I promise I’m not a perfectionist, very far from it, but writing has always taken me a long time, and in order to prevent typos I need to look at it more than once. While this may sound excessive, I’m ultimately glad I spent so much time editing and reworking my writing last spring while I had more time to devote to it. Not only has it made writing blog posts for GSLIS much more efficient (one write and one or two quick edits) but it has been helpful as my role as a reference assistant has expanded to involve more responsibility than I had thought possible.

My library has recently had a lot of staffing changes and with it has come a large shift in responsibilities. We are still working to figure out how jobs will be divvied up – stay tuned for more details as my role is better defined. But one of my new responsibilities is writing a bi-weekly article in our local newspaper. I’m writing to an audience that is (no offense) a bit bigger than the audience here on the GSLIS blog. Practicing my writing skills here has made it much easier as I work to find time in an already packed schedule to write and edit an eight hundred word article every other week. Yet another example of how GSLIS will take you different places than you’d imagined.