Composing Your Reflective Analysis

English 498/504
Internship in Writing and Editing

This end-of-term reflective analysis should review the trajectory of your internship and reflect critically on the tasks you completed, the challenges you faced, and the skills and knowledge you developed as a result of the internship. It’s probably a good idea to compose this document in tandem with your internship portfolio, discussing the categories you derived (and why you derived them) to represent your (evolving!) expertise in nonfiction writing and editing.

Augment your discussion of those categories with some commentary on your growth in writing and editing, and on your enhanced perspective of writing in an organizational setting. Undoubtedly, you nurtured a grander understanding of how this specific workplace culture—together with its “politics,” its specific goals, and its specific culture members—shaped your experience in ways that other workplace cultures simply could not have. Though this understanding may seem above and beyond your actual job assignments, these factors quite likely influenced your job assignments, directly or indirectly. Devote some of your analysis to a discussion of this workplace culture, comparing it with any other workplaces you have known and/or the academic writing you have done.

It might help you to revisit your initial proposal, noting your self-identified strengths and weaknesses from the beginning of the semester, along with your plans to improve upon each. How well did those plans pan out? (Also be sure to discuss the surprises along the way!)

Finally, devote a paragraph or two to your future plans: what do you hope to do most in your nonfiction writing and editing life? Did this internship shape those hopes in any way?