Hello! This is your copy editor speaking! To prepare for landing, please refer to your AP Stylebook, spell out zero through nine and delete those Oxford commas! 

I’ve been your local paper’s loyal copy editor for three years now — just as long as I’ve been a writing, rhetoric & discourse (WRD) major. I wanted to write something for the last issue of my senior year (even though I’m not leaving quite yet). Maybe I’m feeling sappy after quietly copy editing 81 issues of this fabulous paper.

Or maybe this is a love letter to the WRD department. (Spoiler: it’s both.)

If you go digging far enough, you’ll find me admitting in an article in my high school’s newspaper that I was not cut out for beat reporting and anchoring. But despite knowing that, I wrote for that paper for two years and then applied to DePaul University as a journalism major. I hadn’t even toured DePaul! I’d only been to Chicago twice before, and I was touring other schools for manufacturing engineering programs. (Little ol’ Amber didn’t even take AP Physics. What chance did they think they had? The sixth grade hyperfixation on diagramming sentences should have been a sooner sign for a career change.)

I lasted one year as a journalism major before I got curious about those pesky first-year writing classes. A few clicks on Campus Connect later, and by the time I edited my first story at The DePaulia, I wasn’t even in the College of Communication. Liberal Arts and Social Sciences was my new home. The WRD department was my new home.

And what a home it was. Hours and hours and hours of lectures and flex classes and workshops and presentations and discussions and technical difficulties in SAC 301. (Even a few home baked cookies and Sumo oranges to cap off capstone!)

I’ve walked away with a strange mastery. (Peep the polysyndeton and parentheses, Dr. Bokser.) Grammar and style, freelance preparedness and professional writing. The power of words. The ubiquity of meaning. Rhetoric and storytelling. 

Wait… where have I learned that before?

There is one thing I learned in both the College of Communication and the WRD department: everything has meaning. 

Everything is rhetorical. (Yes, Dr. Kalin, even trees). 

You are never not communicating. (An axiom of communication Dr. Baglia drilled into my mind.) 

There are stories in everyone and everything. 

Writing and editing have allowed me to grasp the reins of the horses we call meaning. They have allowed me to take part in the making half of meaning-making, in the telling half of storytelling. 

My preferred writing genres simply take me to realms besides journalism. They’ve taken me to autoethnography and I-search. To daydreamed IRB approvals and borrowed books from professors. (I’ll give them back eventually, Dr. Elliott, I swear.) 

I’ve found a love for plunging my hands into the sands of my communities and writing for them, biased, from within. Storytelling, always. (If any of that sounds interesting, take WRD 210 Cultural Rhetorics with Dr. Reyes. It is a life-changing class.) 

Beyond being a writer myself, I’ve also found a love for helping others tell stories. Whether it be from tiny armchairs or a repurposed office in the basement of the DePaul Center, from that bright orange couch and the round tables of the Writing Center or in a classroom with peers, I have found nothing more fulfilling than hearing someone tell a story they’ve always wanted to tell — their own or otherwise. 

If you can’t be on the ground with a microphone and a notepad, you can still tell stories. Even the quiet places. In the places you dwell and love. In your homes and communities.

Tell those stories. Let others help you tell those stories. Help others tell stories. 

Oh, and to anyone who ever wants to write about their communities: take some WRD classes. I promise, you will always come out of them a better writer, a better editor, a better storyteller.

This sounds like a sendoff, but I couldn’t let go of the WRD department quite yet. I’ll be here for at least one more year pursuing my master’s. (Let’s see how long the combined degree program really takes.) 

And if you want to hear more from me, keep an eye out for a new DePaulia newsletter. Catch me in your inbox next fall! ‘Til then.