Biography
I recently began the MA in Professional Writing program at Carnegie Mellon after working for fifteen years in sales and marketing at Dow Jones & Company in Dallas, TX. During this time, I also began teaching freshman composition at a local community college, which eventually set me on the path to discovering how I might combine my extensive corporate experience with my love of writing and language. Upon completion of my MA, I hope to secure a position in Corporate Communications facilitating internal communication among employees.
Education
- M.A. in Professional Writing (2010)
- Carnegie Mellon University
- M.A. in English (1993)
- University of Dallas
- B.A. in English (1988)
- Thomas More College
Courses
- Professional & Technical Writing
- Communication Design Fundamentals
- Classical Rhetorical Theory
- Theory and Research in Internet Studies
- Rhetorical Grammar
- Style
Professional Writing Samples
- News Article
This piece was adapted from a scholarly article that reported the results of a study regarding how writers view their relationships with editors. It was written for an audience of managing and technical editors, but is also appropriate for publication in a magazine, journal, or newsletter with a general audience of professional and technical writers. The article demonstrates my ability to translate expert information and make it accessible to a non-expert audience.
This press release was written at the request of TREAT, a member of the International Gay Bowling Organization, to announce their Summer 2009 fundraiser for the Women's Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh.
"The Midnight Resume" is an updated version of a document originally written in 1996 by three students in the MA in Professional Writing program. The document walks users through the process of creating a resume using the tables feature in Microsoft Word. The final, updated version of the document was written in MS Word after conducting iterative testing on several working drafts and interviewing test users.
- Research and Recommendation Report
“Customer Relationship Management: Choosing the Right CRM Application” is a hypothetical report written and submitted as part of my application to the MA in Professional Writing program. The report presents research findings on two types of deployment models for CRM applications, evaluates both types of application based on a defined set of criteria, and makes a final recommendation for a client.
- Magazine Cover
The cover for the fictional magazine "21st Century Rhetorician" is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to a friend on the occasion of passing his PhD qualifying exams. It demonstrates my ability to design a unified piece of visual/verbal communication using layout, images, type, and color. The piece was composed on a commercial web site that lets users build and customize magazine covers from templates.
- Book
This piece is a collection of my mother's recipes and was written as a tribute to her. The project demonstrates my understanding of the fundamentals of communication design and page layout using a grid system. The book was composed using Adobe InDesign and images were edited using Adobe Photoshop.
- Poster
Composed in Adobe Illustrator, the goal of this project was to capture the emotion and feeling of an episode of the radio show This American Life through type and color only, without the use of images. The episode, titled "Last Words," addresses the human desire to immortalize oneself in words at the moment of death. The poster uses only the Univers type family with a red, white, grey, and black color scheme to simultaneously convey a feeling of life, the finality of death, and the ephemeral, almost ghostly quality inherent in a person's last utterance.