Assistant Director of Development Rhonda K. Miller: “writing…can take a person anywhere”

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

I’ve been writing faculty profiles for Bucknell’s Web site. I interview new or newly promoted faculty, then write their story on a freelance basis. Sometimes I interview long-term faculty who haven’t had a profile published. These are 300-400 word vignettes that often present challenge since the faculty are extremely accomplished. It forces brevity. For my full-time job, I write campaign proposals, pledge forms, endowment agreements, donor letters and other more technical pieces related to fundraising at Bucknell. Personally, I am reworking a story I filed about three years ago in Robert Rosenberg’s advanced fiction course. I’m rethinking the entire approach, while trying not to overthink it. I hope to publish a version of it someday.

What do you love about it?

I’ve been writing nonfiction professionally for 26 years, and my favorite part is learning about topics that I wouldn’t have picked on my own. One of the first stories I published was about a grocery story that doubled as an opossum museum in an obscure part of Texas. I’ve done news stories on pretty much everything – interviewing a local farmer who grew a 75-pound zucchini to recounting the last days in a 22-year-old’s life prior to his brutal murder. When I worked for the New York Times Magazine Group, I traveled around the country reviewing fancy tennis resorts, and I wrote about the fitness routines of players such as Steffi Graf. I’ve written about tennis equipment, small town government, industrial chemical fires and the benefits of nap rooms for employees. I’ve worked at local newspapers and national magazines – what I love about writing is it can take a person anywhere. Think: Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

What about writing drives you nuts?

I usually dread starting, but it’s always worth it.

How would you describe your writing process?

When I worked in the news business, there wasn’t time to ruminate over stories. You went out, got the story, came back, wrote and filed by deadline. I was only concerned about meeting deadline with an accurate account of what I was reporting. I realized years later that I might have missed some flavor – describing local personalities or including more of my own voice instead of just the cold, hard facts. By my own voice, I’m not advocating a writer’s opinion in a news story but rather taking more time with turn of phrase. Now I mentally process stories longer than I used to, meaning I think about them for days, sometimes a week, depending on my deadline. I find that my writing flows better. Then I rewrite.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

I want to know if the story makes sense to the reader. I want to know if it has accomplished the assigned mission. Other sets of eyes are always good.

What would you like students to know about writing?

Take time to listen for stories – stories are everywhere! Be willing to try all forms of writing: business, creative, journalism, sports. Read. Two of my undergraduate faculty gave me this advice: 1. Take risks; 2. Have a notebook and pen strapped to your person at all times.

Rhonda K . Miller is an Assistant Director of Development in Development & Alumni Relations. She’s written for Tennis Magazine, Human Resource Executive Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the Norwalk Hour, Fairfield Citizen-News, the Knox Alumnus and Bucknell Magazine, among others.

Sue Ellen Henry: “I need to believe that my reader wants me to succeed.”

Sue Ellen Henry, Associate Professor of Education and Director of Bucknell's Teaching and Learning Center

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

I finished a book manuscript over the summer, and now I’m analyzing some data and writing a journal article based upon this data. I’ve also spent a good bit of time re-writing my syllabus for a course I’ve taught for the past decade, which is a very different sort of project.

What do you love about it?

All three of these projects have an openness to them. While writing them, I didn’t actually know how they would turn out until I had a draft. Then, I reflected on the draft and asked myself some questions: what am I pleased with in this draft? What does this draft not quite do yet for my anticipated audience? What haven’t I discussed that my audience will need to know? In the writing process, until send it to the editor, put it on the photocopier, or post it to Moodle, it’s still a work in progress. The promise that revision can make a piece of writing more clear, more eloquent, more efficient – more beautiful – is there until you submit it as your “final” version.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

Well, of course all this openness means that you can tear yourself up inside revising. I learned this idea that writing was revising very late in life as a graduate student in my masters program. I was failing at writing. I’m not exaggerating here. Everything I turned in came back with my favorite professor’s characteristic “Ugh!” in the margins. I was struggling and couldn’t figure it out. Then I enrolled in a writing workshop, which altered my thinking about what writing was. Prior to this workshop I thought that a paper for a class was a document that I produced after I had read and thought about the topic in absence of writing. Instead, the workshop advanced the idea that rather than something one did at the end of some other thought process, writing itself was the (thought) process—and the means of this process was called rewriting. Our instructor, in an introductory set of remarks, held up Moby Dick in front of him and said, “One thing all of you should recognize is that this book, as famous as it is, could be rewritten today and it could be better than it is right now. This does not mean that it shouldn’t be a classic in its current form, only that a commitment to rewriting is essential to the creation of any classic, to anyone’s best writing.” The thought that Moby Dick could be rewritten was astounding to me. Now I understand that at any particular moment when I seek to do my best writing, sometime later I will be able to improve on the previous session’s writing. This improvement comes about because by writing the first draft, I discover more about what I know (and what I don’t yet understand) and can then attempt to communicate it more clearly in subsequent drafts.  As E.M. Forster is credited with saying: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Does this drive me nuts? Sure. Does it make me feel more in control of the process? Absolutely.

How would you describe your writing process?

I tend to think first about the big sections and the organization of these sections, relative to the audience I’ve imagined for the writing piece. I often make a diagram or outline the major chunks, trying to get a sense for the arc or arrangement of the argument. I then think about what kinds of evidence I’ll need to reach my audience and support this organizational structure. In general, I start writing by thinking through and making notes about the expository elements of writing: audience, purpose, organization and evidence.

It’s also probably obvious that I start early with diagraming and note-taking, giving myself substantial time for revision. Rushed work = crumby work, in my experience. I almost always re-read rushed work and see organizational or sentence-level problems that would be easy to fix.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

I need to believe that my reader wants me to succeed.

I can take nearly any sort of negative feedback on my writing if it is framed in a constructive manner. In graduate school, I once had a reviewer say to me, “I am intrigued by your argument, but I just can’t do anything with your writing.” This feedback paralyzed me. Also in graduate school, my academic adviser would often rewrite in his own words the first 4-5 pages of a draft of mine followed by an ellipse with the marginal comment, “more like this.” This was also not helpful. Helpful feedback frames the critical comments from the reader’s point of view. For example, noting something like, “I was confused at paragraph 5 because in paragraphs 1-4 I thought you were advancing argument X, but in paragraph 5 you seem to use evidence that would support argument Y.” In essence, I need feedback to be framed as a conversation with my document, so that I see the reader’s perspective, which by definition directs my future work as the author to reach that reader with my words.

What would you like students to know about you as a writer?

I continue to struggle with writing, but with practice I am becoming better able to imagine what my audience will need to understand my arguments clearly. Three central questions: 1) Who is my reader? 2) What is the purpose of this piece? and, 3) What does the reader need to achieve this purpose? are useful for any piece of writing, be it a short email or a book-length manuscript. I use these questions as a check on all my official writing. Asking these questions tells me I am a writer.

Find out more about Sue Ellen's work as a writer and as a teacher.

Xiaoying Pu '17 writes about the possibility of using freshwater mussels to monitor water contamination related to gas shale

Xiaoying Pu ’17 (right) and Sean Reese, Aquatic Biologist with Bucknell’s Environmental Center, collecting freshwater mussels.  Advised by Prof. Carl Kirby, Xiaoying examined freshwater mussels as possible biomonitors for barium and strontium associated with flowback water from hydraulic fracturing.  

What writing project are you working on right now?

This summer I have been doing research in the Geology Department with Professor Carl Kirby. It is a feasibility study on using freshwater mussels to monitor possible contamination by barium and strontium. These elements have very high concentrations in flowback water, one of the many environmental concerns from Marcellus Shale gas development in the area. I analyzed for barium and strontium concentrations in mussels’ annual shell layers. The report that I am working on is a summary of the field and lab work; I am also trying to discuss whether the chemistry in mussel shells could be interpreted as a temporal record of water chemistry, thus the bio-monitoring aspect.

What do you love about it?

I was very excited to be part of this project right after my freshman year, and learned everything about mussels and much more from scratch. Using freshwater mussels for flowback monitoring would be a novel approach, and I have been curious to see how it would work out. Only after I looked into the records did I realize how little we actually know about river water quality and these benthic animals. Also, this report has been something very different for me, because part of the materials includes my own observations and data.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

Since I was trying to correlate elemental concentrations in mussel shells to water chemistry records through time, I hoped to be able to determine which growth ring in the shell layers corresponds to which year. After digging around in the literature, it occurred to me that it is not conflicting opinions that were frustrating, but  confident claims that a certain method would work, while the specimens that I had suggested otherwise. Ultimately I decided that the best thing to do was to simply write down my observations and avoid over-interpretation.

How would you describe your writing process?

Though a ten-week research project seemed to be long, I was advised to begin writing from day one. I had an outline at an early stage, and then I made the figures and tables as I gathered data. These preparations were very functional in planning to write and in the actual writing. When I was not dissecting mussels or doing something else, I wrote the body of the report section by section.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

Besides the report I also did a poster presentation. When talking to people outside the project, I was constantly surprised at how to-the-point some of their questions were. The interest in shale gas and mussels also confirmed the significance and promise of my project.

What would you like students to know about you as a writer?

As a true novice in scientific writing, I feel so lucky to find it rewarding and meaningful, and I look forward to future challenges.

Bio: Xiaoying Pu '17 majors in Computer Science and Engineering. Her hometown is Shanghai, China.

Traveler Alena Hadley '04 on writing about her passion and finding her voice

Alena Hadley

Psychology and English major, Class of 2004

Hometown: Dayton, Ohio

As a social science researcher, I use writing to produce data reports and issue briefs. Though I did a fair amount of creative writing when I was younger, I more recently pigeonholed myself as a technical writer and consequently became insecure about my abilities to express myself more artistically. So, when a friend of mine forwarded me a job announcement for freelance travel writers, I was hesitant to apply. My intense desire to be involved in the travel industry eventually compelled me to get over my anxieties. I typed up some writing samples, applied for the job, and was swiftly rejected.

I felt discouraged, but only briefly. Before I completed the application I had shown my writing samples to a small group of friends, including one who is an established travel writer. They all enjoyed my pieces and assured me that their praise was impartial and not rooted in their love for the author. My rejection letter had conveyed a generic message: “We typically reject pieces based on issues such as the quality of the writing or lack of subject matter knowledge.” I became incensed instead of discouraged. My writing is great, and I’m a travel expert. Even the travel writer said so. What did these people know? 

I decided to start a blog, which I reasoned would give me more creative freedom than I would have writing for a magazine. As I started churning out entries on my travel adventures, an incredible thing happened: I found my creative voice and began to love writing again. Writing about my passion has given me the confidence to show my pieces to the world. For the first time in a long time, I feel truly excited about what I am typing on the screen. That is not to say that I don’t see the importance of my nine-to-five work. I appreciate the place that my reports have in the world and am satisfied that they are used to inform policy. But I love my blog posts. They are my creations. They enable me to savor my experiences and, hopefully, inspire others to explore.

My blog’s reception on the web has been positive thus far, and I am exceedingly grateful for that. However, the amount of personal satisfaction I get from this pursuit greatly outweighs any outside praise I could receive. If you need a platform for voicing your passion, create it. If you’re writing about what you love, you’re certain to be a success. 

Check out Alena's blog!

Katelyn Allers on exoplanets and contributing to the encyclopedia of the universe

Katelyn Allers

Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

Right now I have two manuscripts in the works.  The first is the write-up of the design analysis and first results for a custom filter (similar to a camera filter) that I designed a few years ago.  The filter is designed to easily identify very low-mass stars and planets outside of our solar system (exoplanets).  The second manuscript is based largely on the work of Joe Lyons, a UMass-Amherst student who participated in Bucknell's NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in the Physics and Astronomy Department.  This paper is about determining if a planet or very low-mass star is young.  And by "young" we mean about 10 million years old!

What do you love about it?

Both of these papers are exploring directly-imaged exoplanets, which make up a new and exciting field in astronomy.  The first directly imaged exoplanets were discovered in 2008, and it seems like every new study reveals something unexpected about their nature.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

As is common in the field of astronomy, our work builds on previous studies. This can be somewhat aggravating, if the previous studies have been presented at a conference, but not published in a refereed journal.  Even worse is when the refereed journal article comes out and has very different results than the conference paper we were working from.

How would you describe your writing process?

I try to write a paper in plots.  I come up with the scientific plots that will best tell the story I'm going for and then craft the written manuscript around those plots.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

Feedback from people in my field who are likely to use my results is the most useful (i.e. from my audience).  For example, I will try to solicit feedback on my filter design paper from scientists who might use my analysis to design their own filters. 

What would you like students to know about you as a writer?

One thing I think students should understand about scientific writing is how an individual's work is a piece of a much bigger puzzle.  My work builds on the work of other scientists and will, in turn, be built upon by future scientists.  I like to think that I'm helping write the encyclopedia of the universe!