Amber Corkey is no stranger to WRD as a 5th year student completing the combined degree program. A graduate of the undergraduate program, Amber will soon complete the MAWRD degree with a Professional and Digital Writing concentration and a SWAN (Strategic Writing and Advancement for Nonprofits) certification. Not only is Amber a tutor and Professional Development Student Manager at the Writing Center, they also hold the title of Chief Copy Editor and Newsletter Editor at The DePaulia. Read on to learn more about this star student, their plans for the future, and what experiences have impacted them the most during their time in WRD at DePaul.
How did you initially find your way to the WRD program?
I started at DePaul as a journalism major, but I learned quickly that I wasn’t built for beat reporting. I could be an editor, or I could write with longer deadlines. WRD 103 and 104 introduced me to the department, and WRD 204 Technical Writing was my first foray into WRD electives. I declared myself as a WRD major going into my sophomore year. Then I found out about the combined degree program and knew I wanted to keep learning the practical and technical skills of writing. The rest is history!
How have the skills gained through your tutoring career been applied to your work at DePaul?
Tutoring at the Writing Center has made me such a better writer. Working with so many different writers has exposed me to so many different writing approaches and processes and techniques and passions. It’s shown me that I can alter my process in such amazing ways to work for me. It also forces me to know my stuff. I always tell new tutors that they can fall back on their position as a reader, because eventually you’ll find the language for what you want to describe. I feel that my WRD career has fed back into my tutoring in just that way. I have a rich vocabulary of rhetorical techniques and writing phenomena to tell writers, who might doubt the quality of their work, that what they’re doing on the page is effective, is precedented, and even has a name. I also do a lot of technical, professional, and copy writing at the Writing Center: procedural documents, millions of Slack messages, even newsletter copy and design. It’s taught me how to be concise and aware of my audience.
Tell me about your Independent Study! What are you hoping to gain from that experience?
I’m hoping to study a very specific facet of table-top role-playing games: safety tools. It’s something I’ve researched before through literature reviews in other WRD classes. But what’s new is being able to position myself as an activist-scholar: someone from the community writing to better the community. I’m hoping to come out of the Independent Study with both a list of tools and documentation to share with the community as well as a better understanding of the activist-scholar position.
What kind of work would you like to do post-graduation?
I still feel like it’s up in the air. I love technical writing, tutoring, and editing. I feel like I could end up anywhere and be happy. Strangely enough, I would love to work as a copy editor at a publishing house. I interned at a publishing house over the summer, and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I feel that I’m good at really niche things–grammar and details and all that comes with the territory of copy editing–and I’d love to use that skill to help writers bring their works to life.