Emily Martin

Emily, as a Transy alum that had taken the same class that we are taking now, instantly established an understanding with the rest of the class. She knew right away to talk about the different types of writing that she was doing. For St. Vincent's hospital, much of her work requires her to turn projects that she wouldn't normally find enjoyable to something that gives an engaging narrative to her audience. She put an emphasis on prewriting and outlining: how could she create a story from, for example, a letter to a prospective donor?

She discussed the value of video as a medium, how videos are valuable rhetorical artifacts, and how taking WRC classes that required her to use video software such as iMovie gave her a different perspective on how the creation of a resource doesn't have to be restricted to text-based works.

As long as a piece served its particular purpose and that purpose could be clearly shown and achieved through each piece that is created, it will be effective. But, she also brought up a point that writers struggle with a lot. When writers are working with their specific subject, they can be hesitant to ask questions for the fear that they'd appear ignorant or even offensive. When working with nonprofits whose mission involves sensitive material like the CAC, it's easy to be almost averse to approaching them especially since we (as students who are not employed nor have any sort of long standing involvement with the CAC) might find their suggestions problematic. For example, in their most recent critique of our product, they felt it would be good to use external images. As a group, we felt that this would be distasteful at best and possibly offensive. We wanted as much as possible to avoid making the Poverty Simulation look like a parody, and what if external imagery would merely lend to a caricature?

We were trying to convince people that a poverty simulation is, to an extent, effective, and we thought this would be a factor that would drive people away. However, instead of saying this, one of our group members timidly stated that it might be difficult to access images like that.

Honestly, we didn't expect for our conversations to take a turn like that, but Emily's advice was sound. In her work, she expects a lot of shifts and new accommodations to be made because they happen so often. She has to be ready to adapt to any kind of situation that arises. I had a long discussion with my group on whether we should send correspondence inquiring about external images or if we should work without them. We didn't want to go against the vision of the CAC, but we wanted to "take the high road" so to speak, and didn't know what that would entail. We settled on the idea that adding more images would make the video longer than it needed to be and that what was necessary to focus on was the audio, voice overs, length of text quotes and statistics, and incorporation of other ideas that the CAC has given us.