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Context

    I served as the PWR program’s Social Media Intern for the Spring 2020 and Fall 2020 semesters. During my second semester, the main topic I wanted to highlight was that of student experiences in the program. PWR may be a relatively new and small major at Elon, but the experiences that students have in and out of the classroom define the way in which the program prepares students for writing beyond their university years. All majors are required to complete at least one internship and two credit hours of research, although some go beyond the requirements in these areas and/or take advantage of another experiential learning opportunity at Elon--especially studying abroad. I wrote three blog posts throughout the semester featuring three students’ involvement in one of the three aforementioned areas of experiential learning. 

    For each blog post, I emailed the student I chose a list of questions about their experience which they answered on their own time and sent back to me. I edited the responses for grammar and clarity while keeping as much of the original meaning as possible, wrote an introduction myself, revised the whole post based on feedback from my supervisor, and then published the post on WordPress. After publication, I always advertised the blog post by sharing the link directly on Twitter and Facebook before adding the link to the @elonpwr Instagram bio and posting the student’s photo from the blog post on Instagram with a caption directing followers to the link in the bio.

Rhetorical Decisions

    When choosing a student to highlight for the research area, I chose Angela Myers for two main reasons. First, her status as an Honors Fellow and Lumen Prize winner added ethos to the post and reflected well on the PWR program as a whole. Second, her project not only seemed relevant to a topic that many college students care about (sexual assault prevention), which would therefore increase pathos; but the timing (kairos) of the post also worked in preparing for the Elon Empowers sexual assault prevention campaign sponsored by the Gender and LGBTQIA Center (GLC) using content that Angela created. The GLC shared the blog post on their social media accounts as introductory material for the campaign, and my sharing it on the PWR accounts logically connected the Elon Empowers graphics that I posted later back to the program. An organization’s promotion of a social issue works best when logos is present, provided in this case by a PWR major’s using her rhetorical research to create the campaign.

    As I prepared for this post, I sent the questions in an order that I thought would tell a story about Angela’s whole research process--basically in chronological order. The way in which she answered provided easy-to-follow transitions between each question, so I did not change anything about her responses besides polishing the grammar. I asked Angela for a headshot that I could add to catch the reader’s eye both on the blog and on social media and placed it near the intro so that the principle of proximity would allow the reader to associate Angela’s face with her name as they continued reading. The social media captions I wrote for the ads provided a quick summary of the post so that my audience could get a general idea of what Angela was doing before choosing to dive deeper into the complex topic of student research by reading the full blog post (a better medium for detailed writing than a caption with character limits).

Reflection

    Of the three student-driven blog posts that I wrote, I received the most informative responses to the interview questions and got the most likes on the social media advertisements for this one. Because of my strategic planning for this blog post, it led to my first real social media collaboration--by sharing each other’s posts and tagging each other on Instagram, the GLC and PWR program promoted each other and both benefitted. I also applied my editing skills to the writing of the post and improved my interviewing abilities by developing the questions that I did. Finally, the whole experience will likely be beneficial when I come across situations involving corporate social responsibility in professional settings.