The language may be different, but we're really talking about the same thing

I had a meeting for work today that wasn't quite what I expected or was used to. It actually went better than I thought, mostly because the person who I thought would create the most waves seems to have not read the document I sent out at the beginning of the week. I'm not one to get offended if you don't read what I write, so it worked out well.

It was the biggest meeting I've been in to date - 6 of us - which might not seem like much, but most of my meetings have been with 2 or 3 people at the most. I wasn't looking forward to it because I suspected it would drag on - it did - but it consoled me in some ways because it quelled some misgivings I'd been having about this job.

I took the position because I had the experience to pull it off and I thought it was close enough to my career goals that I could actually include it on a cv. (Even at my most creative, I don't think I could make coffee schlepping at Tim Horton's into a line on the cv) But much of the work I began with was mundane or seemed far removed from academia.

But today's meeting made me realize it's really just a question of a different vocabulary. It was a pre-production meeting, where we were hammering out the aesthetics and optics of how we wanted to present the content that I'd developed for our project. We've already done one project with the same host website, so it needs to look similar to the existing project, which gave us a basic framework to start from. But we still needed to think about how this particular project will demand a different approach, and what tone we want to take with it as well as what combination of text, image, video, and audio we wanted. As we talked about it, I began to realize that our talk of users and scripts was really the same thing as audience and voice that we talk about in academia.

I had been afraid that my work for this company might be perceived as lying too far afield from my academic work, so I was pleasantly surprised to realize much of what we were talking about was the same things we talk about when writing within the academy. We just use different words.

True, I've really only talked of audience and voice in the context of teaching writing composition to undergrads, and not really in terms of my own scholarly work, but there's something to be said for paying attention to audience and voice in scholarly work that I don't think we get much instruction in as graduate students. Perhaps that's because we're supposed to know this and I'm the only one who doesn't. But if recent research, like the article in this year's edition of Profession put out by the MLA is any indication, I'm not the only one who isn't taught this stuff. Maybe it would make moving from student to scholar a clearer transition if we did talk more about audience and voice in the context of say, the dissertation. But that might be a post for another day.