Introductions
Transcript
Shanna Butler: My name is Shanna Butler, I graduated from BYU in Print Journalism and English a long time ago. I worked for the Church magazines for 6 or 7 years. I did an internship with them while I was in school and then when I got out of school they hired me on full time. I worked for the New Era Magazine there and I held various positions. I did copy editing, I did free lance- I did writing and now I do free lance writing for them from home. I quit about a year and a half ago when I had my baby. So far I have been working from home for them and I’ve been doing other writing projects from home.
Fidel Montero: Fidel Montero, I’m an Assistant Principal at Timpview High School. I’m in charge of overseeing instruction in the building. Along with my colleagues, we make sure that our hiring is in place; our staff is up and functioning. when we have student discipline issues, we address those, the facilities make sure that they are safe that they’re well kept; working with the parents, the community- so it’s a job with a lot of different hats. A good illustration of a time where writing was a critical component of my work happened last spring when we had an incident here at school that needed to be processed by our school district and also by the courts and they relied heavily on my description of the incident where we had several students involved in some criminal activity. I had to describe what happened and be as specific as I could be so that the judges and that the other people who were assessing the situation had a clear picture. I also had to do it in a way so that it wasn’t a lengthy document that they would ignore because of the importance of it.
As I was applying for a doctoral program, I had to write and explain—to the committee who was deciding on whether I would get accepted to the program—who I was and what I did as an educator and what my vision of education was. And again, I had to do it in a concise manner but in a way also that it would give them an idea of who I was and whether I was qualified to be in their program.
James Christensen: My name is James Christensen. I am a painter, an artist. I studied art in California, at BYU, and later joined the faculty. I spent 21 years in the art department at BYU. I publish my paintings as limited edition prints with Greenwich workshops. And I’ve had an opportunity to do seven or eight book projects that I’ve been kind of excited about. But primarily I think of myself as a painter, as a visual person.
Claudia Laycock: As a district court judge, I use writing on a daily basis. The process by which you become a judge starts with an evaluation that goes out to judges that you have appeared in front of and attorneys that you have appeared in front of. Part of that evaluation talks about your writing ability, your ability to express yourself, to apply legal principles, both in writing and in the courtroom. So it’s something that you get judged on. And the governor gets that, the committee that looks at you first before you go up to the governor looks at those evaluation.
Geoffrey Germane: My name is Geoffery James Germaine. I am consulting mechanical engineer specializing in the analysis of motor vehicle collisions. I work for myself, Germane engineering. We are an engineering company that has about six engineers and some technical staff. We are—as a consulting engineer, I provide expert witness testimony as well as analysis and research.
The reputation that we have developed is in large part due to writing, not only the reports that we have talked about but also the technical papers where we have done some research and analyzed, a lot like in the academic world. We publish in the same journals as academic people do. Our services are sought by those in the industry, the motor vehicle industry, that know us through our reputation. We publish papers in the open literature that engineering organizations disseminate. It’s word of mouth primarily.
Abe Mills: My name is Abe Mills and I sing in a group called Jericho Road. We’re a, we used to be a boy band, but now we’re too old so we’re kind of a man band now.
First of all we have a website, and so we kind of, we kind of maintain everything. On the website you always have to have updates: if you go on tour you’ve got to have some kind of thing registered about how the tour was, if you’re doing a concert you’ve got to have something written up about what’s coming up and why the people should be there. Also an aspect just doing music, if you’re trying to write a song there’s always that process that comes in. Those are probably the most . . . the two ways that writing comes, plays a part.
Susan Meyer: My name is Dr. Susan Meyer and I am a research plant ecologist with the US Forest Service. I have a full time research position at a federal lab here on campus, it is called The Shrub Sciences Laboratory and I’ve been there for about 23 years.
We have a broad mandate for our unit. What we work on is what we think is a pretty important issue that is very, very large. It is trying to stop and reverse the degradation of public lands in the west. Public lands are sort of going down the tubes right—you’ve read about the huge fires, the weed issues, the over grazing, there are just tremendous issues that leave the land in ruins. Our job is to figure out a way to reverse that. So within that framework, its pretty easy to find important things to work on—the trick is choosing which ones are the most important. We have done quite well.
Terry Olson: My name is Terry Olsen. I am in the School of Family Life. My area is Family Life Education and Marriage and Family Therapy.
Writing is central, I think, to almost any profession if you think about it; and in my own, its more than being able to put something on paper—it’s being able to influence others with something you hope is coherent. I have to confess that I have only learned to write by writing. No matter how much I have written, I feel that I still have not learned how to write. Writing disciplines me and writing helps me to influence other people in the profession to consider both ideas and research. Writing is inescapable, and I had no idea at the beginning of my career how fundamental writing really is to making a difference in the world.
Susan Black: My name is Susan Easton Black and I am a professor of Church History and doctrine at BYU.
When you get more confident in who you are, and you know that you are inspired by the Holy Ghost, there is an obligation to share what you know in whatever form it’s in. I can only talk to x number of people in a classroom, I can only talk to x number of people at a fireside or a happy birthday relief society, but when I write I can talk to the world and I can keep talking.