Rough Draft

It’s Lake day.  A warm summer afternoon, the sun rays are birsting through the leaves on the oak trees.  The sound of birds chirping and wind blowing through the tree branches you would expect on a perfect day at the lake are being drowned out buy up beat music and high school students chanting to start the lake games team competition.  Welcome to camp.  Now to many camp is a place where children run wild and adventure all day long getting lost in the woods, eating black berries , ext.  A place to waist the day away floating in the lake or watching the clouds go by.  This is not that camp.  Welcome to Forest Home, one of the top camps in California.  Forest home is a fast paced jam packed camp that can accommodate up to two thousand people.  With five different camp settings and different retreats both put on by the camp and rented out to guest groups Forest home is a place of diversity.  At first glance a camp does not seem like the place that has any sort of writing with thought behind it but this is far from the truth.  In this business understanding an audience is necessary to effective rhetoric along with a thoughtful use of tone and language.   

In a camp so large with so much going on it is extremly important to fully understand who you are working with.  This is why I interviewed Sandy.  Sandy works as Forest Home’s lead event planner.  She works in booking and orchestrating guest groups that rent out a facility and use it for a retreat of their own instead of participating in a programed retreat at camp.  Sandy has a large task at hand in scheduling and coordinating al that will be needed for each and every guest group that comes to Forest Home.  Sandy is a connecter, she brings each department that is necessary for the retreat to happen together.  From the moment the contact Forest Home Sandy walks them through ever detail of planning their trip, while some of this is done over the phone most of their communication is done over email.  

This is where the importance of knowing your audience comes in.  Sandy has seen it all. groups young and old, very planned and incredibly disorganized.  Sandy explains that when 

“we talk to different pastors and guest groups and serve a lot of different generational groups and leaders, different ethniticites, different cultures so I've gotten into reading the gage of how someone wants to be communicated with.  I mean I have worked with group leaders that don't feel comftorable working one on one with women.  I work with groups that don't speak english.  Remembering how we communicate is important.  I try to portray that in my email”.  This is important.  The first step to effective and thriving communication between Sandy and her guests is understanding who they are and what they are about.  A first hint to doing this is the basic knowledge sandy gets about them.  

What does this actually look like? Well, lets start with what type of group they are.  For example, a young youth pastor (lets call him Andy) is bringing in forty junior high students, they are excited for their first trip to camp and want to plan a fun weekend that will bring their group together.  Andy leaves Sandy a warm and causal voicemail expressing interest in booking a weekend and also emails her some more details about their group.  Based off her little knowledge of Andy’s group Sandy knows that the tone of her response email can be and should be more conversational.  She can add in a blurb about herself and how exciting her first retreat was as a junior higher.  Sandy can agknolege that the stress of planning a first retreat is real and expected and that she has confidence in Andy.  Most importantly that she will make sure everything goes accordingly, they are a team now and she is happy to help.  Now she has made a real life connection with her audience because she catered directly to them and their communicaiton will flow much easer from this point on.  

Take for example a much more formal group.  Sharla, the group leader for a three hundred count womens emails Sandy to book the same weekend that they had last year.  Sandy knows from past experience that this is a very particular group of women who take pride in making a beautiful and detailed experience.  Sharla’s email expresses interest in upgrading their housing choices for the stay and placing an order for particular meals to have alterations to the menu.  From reading this group Sandy can already tell that they wish to be communicated with formally and thuroly.  When catoring to your audience It’s differences like staying very strait to the point, clear,  and formal or adding an extra bold word or explanation point that give the extra touch of feeling known.  

this will be the part of the paper that I reference the rhetoric cartoons and what they say about tone and voice and how it makes such a difference.  Sandy is like one of those superstores, she is making the communication process easer for the reader because they don't have to decode what she has written them.  they have an idea of what to expect but they are given even more context to decode when sandy makes it personal to them.  

Sandy writes in another tone and rhetoric when she writes to her staff.  Her staff is a young fresh out of college group that host the guest groups that sandy has scheduled.  She is the leader of the team and expressed a great appreciation for them in our interview.  Because she has a different relationship with them she can use a different tone.  I would also like to point out that I think the way she writes to them has a huge impact on the team dynamic.  I know we have all experienced bosses that are very direct and to the point.  they consider their employees as replaceable and people who are getting the job done, not valuable people with individual personalities and skills.  

The tone that sandy speaks to her staff with creates a whole different atmosphere.  

"here I will quote part of her email to her staff"  See how in this example she sparks warmly to them works like "akfjs;odkjapokdj" create a sense of appreciation and thankfulness for them.  

To back this up I will use another example of how this is proven in our readings. I will give a quote from the readings and then explain how it relates to sandy.  

When I close my paper I will make the connection to sandy's job and her writing.  In sandy's job she has to take a camp and make changes to it for each different type of guest.  

Some may want the meal times changed or may want to bring in a huge band or DJ.  Some groups want to bring large tends and set up all kinds of extra activities while others want a small quite room and extra tea at night.  

All groups are different.  All writing is different.  Even though Sandy uses a template  checklist to send to all of her groups she modifies it depending on who the group is.  Much like writing we have templates to decode what we are reading.  The back of a shampoo bottle, an academic paper, an email to request an informational interview.  These are all things that we already know how to structure but as we learn from sandy we have the ability to taylor to particular people for a purpose to make our writing better.  We make our wring more understandable for the reader which makes them feel known, like sandy host staff.