Hello! Jennifer here again. I am
still enjoying my digital internship with the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs as a writing and editing intern. In my last post, I spoke more in depth
about the various aspects of my internship and what I do on a day-to-day basis,
but today I wanted to dive in to a specific project and show you some of my
work.
One project I specifically worked
on was updating the Teacher’s Resource Guide for Veterans Day 2018. I wanted to
share this because it is different from our usual Veteran of the Day blog posts
that take up most of my time. First, a little bit about the guide, and then
I’ll tell you what I did to work on it. This is a guide which provides
information to teachers and students nationwide about Veterans Day. It lays out
information on how to hold a school assembly and then offers general
information on veterans’ service organizations, America’s wars, the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier, as well as scholarships and information on how to properly respect
the flag. This is basically the go-to guide for educators as a catch-all of
important things to know about Veterans Day.
This project was sent out as a last
minute to-do on a Friday afternoon, with a deadline of Monday morning.
Thankfully, I am often able to take my time to sit down over the weekends and
complete work since the internship is exclusively online. I accepted the work
not knowing that it would require me to do more than my usual writing and
editing, but also a bit of graphic design and extensive formatting in Word
(which I am horribly rusty on). However, I forged onward.
I began by reading the 15 page
document from start to finish, fixing minor spelling and grammar errors along
the way. While I did this, I also learned a great deal about Veterans Day and
the traditions surrounding it. For example, I found out that England and France
also created a tomb for an “Unknown Soldier” following World War I, and every
year on November 11 (then known as “Armistice Day”), all these countries would
show gratitude at that tomb at the same time. This was done in a movement of
remembrance and in hope that World War I would be the last world war (which
unfortunately, it was not, but that part I already knew!).
After the text editing, I realized
that some of the graphics needed to be updated for 2018. A picture of President
Obama needed to be replaced with a current one. Any graphic that noted “2017”
needed to be changed. I considered asking for a graphic designer to help, but
it was the weekend and I also wanted to impress my supervisor. It took a
lengthy amount of time, but I figured out how to change the graphics (using
Paint… very high tech!). I replaced the necessary photos and managed to
reformat a couple pages of the document to fit the new images.
In the end, I am glad I took this
project on by myself. Although I didn’t hold all the necessary skills when I
began, I was able to teach myself with a little effort and came out of it with
new skills. Working on this guide is the epitome of public history as it is one
form of where history comes together to meet the public. Veterans Day is an
important day to remember those who served our country, and putting together
this guide helps make that importance accessible to teachers and students in a
way they can understand. Perhaps you will run into it yourself!
Below is the front page of the
guide, which I helped to create:
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