I have excellent communication skills, written and spoken, and I have developed them in a variety of contexts, both before and during my MIS degree. Through my post-secondary career, I have developed skills in writing for public, academic, and professional audiences. For example, in 2020, I worked for the Discovery Centre in Halifax, NS as a researcher and content writer for a new exhibit. Then, in 2024, I built on coursework completed during my MA in English to create an edited edition of a seventeenth-century poem, “The Brahman,” as part of the Pulter Project, a collaborative digital edition of the poems of Hester Pulter. Finally, during my co-op placement at the Library of Parliament, I learned to write reference responses in a neutral, professional register.
Discovery Centre
At the Discovery Centre, the bulk of my work was helping to create a new display on microplastics for the Ocean Gallery (The Divert NS Ocean Action Zone). My role was to research and draft the text of the exhibit. As a humanities student at the time, this meant rapidly familiarizing myself with current research on marine microplastics, a completely new field to me at the time, and understanding it well enough to write about it in plain language appropriate for the Discovery Centre’s target grade four reading level. This position helped to improve my ability to write clearly and concisely, without relying on complex vocabulary to convey information accurately.
Along with giving me practice in writing for a different audience, this job also gave me a new perspective on ways in which information can be made accessible to people. To ensure that people would remain engaged with the exhibit, we combined the text I wrote with visual graphics, physical objects, and interactive pieces like a microscope.
“The Brahman”
My amplified edition of “The Brahman” grew out of an assignment for a course on seventeenth-century women’s writing in my MA, taught by Prof. Victoria Burke. The assignment was to create an amplified edition of an assigned poem, based on the examples available through The Pulter Project. After the course finished, I decided to revise and improve my edition, with Prof. Burke’s help, and submitted it to The Pulter Project for peer review. After further revisions recommended by the reviewers, it was published in 2024. This project helped me to develop my academic writing style and served as an example of how I could approach an academic project that was not a paper.
Co-Op Terms
My co-op placement was in Branches and Reference at the Library of Parliament, where I did the training and work of a reference librarian. For the most part, this has meant writing reference responses to clients using appropriately formal language, while maintaining the Library’s neutrality and without implying analysis of my own. For me, this was a big shift compared to writing, well, literary analysis papers during my previous two degrees, which I reflected on in my co-op reports.
This co-op term has allowed me to develop a professional writing style suited to the context of a legislative library and to better understand the differences between professional and academic writing. In academic humanities writing, which I have been doing for six years and teaching for two, active voice is vastly preferred to passive and one’s own ideas should be presented as such. Both of these were habits I had to break in writing research responses because the library’s style guide encourages a more detached style for research responses which encourages the use of passive voice for exactly the reason humanities writing discourages it: to distance the person of the author from the text. In the context of Library of Parliament (LOP) research responses, this helps avoid giving the impression that the response could be taken as including the librarian’s (or LOP’s) personal analysis or opinions, and not just the results of external research. While I still have improvement to make in terms of writing responses which conform to LOP’s guidelines, the feedback I received from other librarians on the Reference team has helped me understand where the differences between this kind of writing and the writing I am more accustomed to come from.
From Summer Co-op Report
Due to confidentiality considerations, I cannot share an example of a real reference request, but the text below is a sample response I wrote as part of a training exercise.
This mock-response, created to give something for people to work with when training on how to review responses, contains numerous deliberate errors, of which the most egregious are missing research in the section on required ministers and biased sources in the comparison section. However, it does give an example of a type of question which I have answered during my time at the Library – in this case, a question on parliamentary procedure. Were this a response meant to be sent to a client, I would have also used resources like Parlinfo to find what ministerial positions have usually been filled and, quite likely, would have looked at Canadian statutes to see when ministerial positions had been changed or created.
For comparisons to other countries, I would have, in the first place, spent more time looking, and, secondly, not included the first two articles in the response – both are opinion pieces and, furthermore, the second article was published in a student newspaper, which is not a source I would generally send in cases where more reliable sources are available. However, if these were the only sources available, then I would likely have included both, to at least give an opinion piece from each side of the political aisle.