Second Rough Draft

Adapt to your readers now or lose them forever
           
In today’s society, writing is everywhere without us even thinking about it. We are writing papers and essays in our classes, we are writing grocery lists and we are sending constant text messages to friends and family. Communication is key: both in business and in relationships and being a good communicator means that you need to be proficient in both oral and written communication. Not only do we use writing because we want to write (text messages, grocery lists, blogs etcetera), we use writing in almost all businesses and professions today. Even the most physical jobs where you spend your days carrying heavy equipment, you still need to work with manuals, communicate with coworkers and maybe keep a log of your hours. After discussing writing with Chad Clark, the area manager at Beach City Apartments we came to the conclusion that writing is everywhere, regardless if you like it or not and being a good writer is essential in order to develop other skills within your field. But what does it mean to be a good writer? As a good writer, the most important skill is your ability to adapt your writing to the audience and the situation that you are facing.

Beach City
Beach City is an apartment complex located in between east and west campus of Santa Barbara City College. The owners, Edward and Claudia St George bought the property in January 2014 and have been working on the construction part since then to make it as fresh and suitable for students as possible. The complex has 97 apartments in different sizes and it holds 450 students at full capacity. The majority of the students are attending SBCC but they also have tenants that are nonstudents. The property consists of four main buildings and three smaller buildings that are called townhouses. Besides the buildings you can also find offices, laundry rooms, a pool area, the Beach Club (playroom and event room), ping pong tables, parking and the “Green Street” which is an area in the center of the property where you cannot drive, it is only made for events, people hanging out and for movie nights. During the summer 2015 the owners of the property hired MMG Housing (a student housing management company) to be in charge of the property and its tenants. Chad Clark is a part of that company and started working as the area manager for Beach City in June this year. As the area manager, Chad said that there is no such thing as a typical day and that all days are different in many ways. He usually goes back and forth between the office located at Beach City and the office located in Isla Vista. He makes sure that the leasing staff knows what to do each day, check their leasing numbers, take care of reports, attends meetings with his manager, the owners, security teams and any other stakeholders that have an interest in the organization. A big portion of the day is spent answering emails and talk to parents of the tenants, answering questions and explaining different processes. I asked how much time he think he spent writing on a normal day and he guessed that he spent 30% of his day writing (mostly emails) and that the majority of his time was spent talking to people (employees, tenants and stakeholders) in person, so oral communication is his strength more so than writing.
            Chad has been working in student housing for 17 years, both at public colleges and universities but also at privately owned student-housing facilities (like Beach City). Besides the interview with Chad Clark I also worked with three writing artifacts that I received from him prior to the actual interview. The first one was the official lease that all tenants have to sign before moving into their apartments, the second artifact was a document explaining the judicial process at Beach City and the last one was an incident report form. I also spent some time looking at their logo and their website to get a better understanding of the company and their way of handling things. 

Audience

In writing, the people who are reading your work are your audience. Adapting to your audience is essential talking about good and efficient writing. Writing an essay about the issues around modern medicine using the same language, as you would in a children’s book will not make you look like a serious writer. On the other hand, using formal language with judicial words and phrases will not work if you are giving out instructions to kids either. When Chad Clark is writing different kinds of documents for his employees at Beach City, he knows what phrases to use and what phrases not to use. When writing an email to his lawyer about the lease he will use words that his leasing staff probably would not understand or know the entire meaning behind.    

            All different departments at Beach City have a different team (the accounting team, the leasing team, the security team and so on) and within those departments they all have their own jargon – different words and phrases that goes along with their responsibilities and positions. When writing different instructions or documents to his employees, he has to think about what department it is going to or if it is going to multiple departments he needs to make sure not to use words that only make sense to one department and not the other. Chad also states that in order to make sure that his writing makes sense he usually have people from different departments reading it if it is an important piece, even if they do not understand every single word they need to get the major points and the big idea of each document. That is a recurrent part of his writing process when he writes anything that is more long-term than an email or just a weekly report.
            When writing the lease (one of the artifacts we discussed) for the new leasing season the process starts with Brent McPherson (Chad’s manager) who is the director of property operations. Brent McPherson will write the lease up discussing it with their lawyer (this process alone is a time consuming one, going back and forth between the two). Then it will go through Chad who will edit the lease and make sure that it makes sense (again, working with their lawyer since it is a formal legal document) and when Chad is done he will pass it on to his leasing manager to proofread it one more time before it is actually considered done and will be used in their leasing process. As we read in chapter seven of “They Say, I Say”, adapting to your audience is mainly about pinpointing who your target is (the reader) and why this piece of writing matters to that person. They talk about how you should ask the question “Who Cares” multiple times when writing something, in order to make sure that you know who your audience is, why they should care and how you should write your piece so that it will make sense to that specific audience. Having an audience reading your piece without knowing why they should care about it or why they should read it will not bring a positive outcome. By showing why and how your piece of writing is relevant to the reader will make that person read it more clearly and with more interest and in order to do so, you need to know who your audience is and how you should adapt your writing so it is as clear as possible to that specific person/group. Having the “Who Cares” question in mind, it makes sense that Chad Clark needs to make sure that the words he is using when addressing his leasing staff, will not be the same words he would use writing something to their lawyer. 

Situation
Not only is it important to adapt your writing to your audience, it is also important to adapt it to the situation you and your audience are in. Chad Clark stated that the major part of his day is spent writing emails and only a small portion of the day will go to write other documents: such as the judicial process or manuals for the resident assistants. He mentions that there are also other types of writing associated with his job, but they are mostly seasonal. The lease and application forms, roommate forms and flyers for advertising are all seasonal documents that will be written or edited at the beginning of each leasing season by him and his leasing staff.                    Discussing writing and how writing is different based on what situation you are in or what context you are facing is essential and that was mentioned multiple times during the interview. Chad explains that writing an email to employees, tenants or parents makes the style of writing is more casual and the language that is used is easier to understand and more casual as well. When writing a document explaining the judicial process on the other hand, the language and style is formal, decisive and forthright. It is all about adapting your writing to match the context and situation that you are in. Writing a lease or a judicial process using casual language and slang would not make a good impression and it would not fill its purpose (inform about something important and bind the tenant to the rules from the landlord).
            In the first chapter of “Understanding Rhetoric”, we can read about how each time your write it will have a different demand, have different expectations and it will need its on ways to make sense of how it should be written. They also state the importance of framing your writing so it make sense with the context using different styles and language. As Chad Clark mentioned during his interview, there is no way to make yourself look presentable if you have a lease with a lot of misspellings and if you are not grammatically correct.
            Reading through the first chapter of “Everything is an Argument” we can also make a clear connection between good writing and adapting to your context. There is a paragraph about considering context and how you cannot write a text in an efficient way if you do not have any information about its context, environment and situation. What is important to keep in mind though is that not only is there a context and situation for your words as the writer, the reader will also interpret your writing differently based on his/hers context and situation. We all have different amount of knowledge prior to the reading, we all have different opinions and we will all imagine the story differently even if we are reading the same words. You have to keep that in mind that no matter how clearly you state something, other people will have their own twist to it when they read it. It is the way we function and there is nothing to do about that. As writers we just have to keep that in mind and try to be as clear and specific as possible to make the best out of our story or information that we are presenting.
            So how do we know that someone is a good writer? Who decides that? Chad Clark stated clearly that he does not enjoy writing and that he is an ok writer but nothing more. He also states that he is better at writing formal documents such as the lease or the judicial process. Does that make him a good or a bad writer in general? As with many other things, enjoying what you are doing will make the outcome better. However, you can absolutely be a good writer even if you do not enjoy it as much as other parts of your everyday work. Great communication, either in person or in writing, requires practice and effort. As a good writer, the most important thing is to make sure that you practice your ability to adapt your writing to your audience and also the situation that you and your audience are facing.