Dr. Reed told me that there are no limits to what you can do with an English major. Dr. Hosey explained that English majors learn how to problem solve. But, I decided to major in English after failing a cursive test during my second year in an Elementary Education major. I figured if I couldn’t write in cursive, perhaps I could analyze literature. I spent the remainder of my college career writing and interpreting the writing of others. And, if I do say so myself, I got really good at it. I now can explain that the oxford comma, or the comma that usually comes before the conjunction in a list, is no longer in common use… but that what matters most is that you stay consistent throughout your work. The world is at my hands! I just had to find a calling.
Gary Soto once said about his life after college graduation, “We were unsure what to do with the rest of our lives. We thought we should write for a living, but could never find that person who would give money for poems.”
I got an internship.
During my interview at PAPA Advertising my soon-to-be-boss explained, “Well, I’ve never taken an English major as an intern before… but I think you’ll be great. We need a great writer.” I excitedly nodded my head and had no regrets about my study of choice.
And then I started as the newest web-writing intern. I was shown my desk and ran my fingers over the letters on the keyboard, closed my eyes, and imagined the vice president being utterly blown away by my absolutely flawless writing skills. “You’ve brought our company to a whole new level, Hazel!” I imagined him saying with a proud and awed smile. “You are the best intern I’ve ever had. Thank god we hired an English major…”
But he didn’t say that at first… I mean (obviously) he hadn’t seen my mastery yet. He asked me to write a press release. “I’m sure you learned the standard format in your classes, “he asked casually.
I thought back to my education…
okay, okay, okay… let’s see… Flannery O’Connor represents the Southern Gothic in her tale about Helga appearing in her infamous collection of short stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” so… using this information I can say…“… um… yeah, no I don’t know what the standard format is.”
“Well, look it up,” he replied while walking away.
I drafted the press release and emailed it to him and waited for his impressed response. An email bounced up in my inbox reading, “This isn’t what I want. Revise.”
This isn’t what you want, revise? Can’t you just give me a B- and I can talk shit about you at the bar with the other majors about how you don’t really know what you’re doing anyway? Better yet, can’t you just give me an A and I can walk away knowing that I am brilliant?
I revised. I resent. I received another email. “I don’t think you understand what we need. Let’s discuss.”
I am now finding, as I am almost finished with the internship that the phrase “Let’s discuss” means “you fail at life.”
The next week I was asked to sit in on a converged PR meeting. I’m not sure what converged PR is yet and I actually don’t think they do either so… all I know is it’s PR and the internet. Or something. Key words? I’m not sure. Anyway, you have to write a different kind of press release, that’s kind of like a regular release, but it’s called a web release and I still haven’t written one that I know if I did right yet. “Hazel, what do you think would be the best way to start a phased post-sales budget and action plan?” The whole table… and it was one of those dark wood glossy tables with the big black conference chairs with the high backs… looked at me. And in the conference room they had this coffee maker in the corner and I thought about all the interns I had heard about at other companies that weren’t allowed to speak and just made coffee for everyone and I envied them.
I tried to figure out what a phased post-sales budget and action plan was.
The work of William Shakespeare shows a lot of inconsistencies that are hard to decode through a biographical approach as much of his records have been lost… there are speculations that he may have come from a Roman Catholic family that was in hiding—we do know that his father owed the government quite a bit of money and these ideas of shame came across through several of his plays and… no no no! F. Scott Fitzgerald used the irony and humor in his short story “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” to critique the American Dream during the roaring twenties as… no! Show, don’t tell! Victorian Gothic writers love windows and bad weather, Bigger Thomas is based on someone real, Moby Dick was not well received until after his death, Alexander Pope believed in strict censorship to ensure the quality of literature!” “I don’t know what that is,” I heard myself say. My boss stared at me blankly. I could tell that he regretted hiring me.
The next week I was invited to sit in on a conference call with an Advertising Representative trying to sell a commercial spot to PAPA to use for one of our clients. I listened with my diligent pen and notebook to take detailed notes with questions and further ideas. I was getting the hang of this.
Channel One News, a news show designed for middle and high school students was pitching a commercial spot within their educational programming for cosmetics. The commercial would show while the students watched the programming in their schools. They explained that they know this commercial will have a good impact because they surveyed 16 and 17 year old girls not exposed to the advertising and 16 and 17 year old girls that were exposed to the advertising, and the second set had a 50% higher rating of brand recognition.
After the call, my boss asked me what I thought.
“I think we really confront the morality in question here. Is it ethical to be pushing cosmetics to girls not yet old enough to vote? In this period, young women are most self conscious of their appearance and perhaps we should be pushing them to value their intellects and personalities rather than the thickness of their eye lashes. As we move past the postmodern period in which authors like Jeanette Winterson really explored the idea of the confines of female body image, especially in the character dogwoman in her novel Sexing The Cherry, I think we should really be concerned about the kind of women we would be breeding with this style of advertising.”
No one said anything for a minute. My supervisor broke the silence, “Uhm.. well. I don’t really care about the morality. Do you think our message would reach potential clients?”
“Oh. No. All the students will be talking through it, just like we did during the announcements.”
And though my educational background has, perhaps, not quite prepared me for this internship the way my boss might have thought it did… I am thankful. Our web designer sent out the published link to a website he had finalized for one of our clients and asked everyone to look through it. He used the wrong form of “effect” twice. When I hopped upstairs to show him, he was relieved and excited that someone caught it… even though he didn’t get exactly what he did wrong.
And, of course, while working on one of those converged PR projects one of the graphic designers said, “wait…do you put a comma like after the last or.. no no the second to last thing when you’re like listing or…?”
I cut her off—“The oxford comma is the comma that traditionally comes after the second to last item in a list, before the conjunction. Though modern AP standards consider the oxford comma to be obsolete, it is most important to simply stay consistent through your work. However since we are working on PR materials, we should probably omit the oxford comma.”
“So.. um… no comma or?”
“No comma.”
She smiled, “Thanks, Hazel. I don’t know what we would do without you!”
rticles on better ways to find employment, published and printed for the masses of jobless citizens. I follow several hilarious and poignant unemployment blogs, written by the ever-so-unemployed. I try to help my boyfriend find further employment as the season causes his hours to diminish.
