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Washington D.C. Metro Area - •Interactive
Content Producer, National Public Radio
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West (Virginia) Meets (Middle)
East
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A travel
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Visions in the Capital
A blog about Washington D.C.’s photo
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I'm not sure I know how to comment on this... but I think you made the things that interest you clear - you like photography, Washington, travel, and green living, and you hope to have these topics associated with you, especially in visual media like photography and video. Clear message.
ReplyDelete-Nigel
A resume is a great example of how all writing should address the audience. The document is all about you, but it is designed for the audience. This is the trick in writing a cover letter as well. Poor resumes and cover letters say me, me, me. Good ones speak to Human Resources and say you, you, you. You will benefit from me. You may not realize it, but I am what you’ve been missing.
ReplyDeleteWriting designed for the audience reaches them. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. But no one trusts too much sugar. The hard part is you actually need to be what they’ve been missing.
A great resume details the growth of an individual into a very specific set of skills, which is then sitting in the hands of someone or someplace that needs that skill set.
Now we all can’t be so specialized and lucky, but as a communications student you should understand the principles behind this and use them to your benefit. Everyone knows to tailor a resume to the company. At the very least you should pursue a certain career and highlight skills from that field in your experience.
In communicating any message, you should stick to that message. A movie has a theme. An essay has a thesis. A resume has a focus too.
I think of a resume as a narrative of your skills. More important than where and when you walked in and out of a job are the skills you built and lessons you learned in the interim. Again, all of the skills addressed should be important to the field you want to pursue.
You are a good writer Viva. Your Devil’s Advocate argument is great. I use this assignment to teach student’s exactly what you are already doing. You think of the opposition’s counter-argument and you break it down step by step. I already saw your ability to understand both sides in your Planned Parenthood piece.
But getting back to your resume, I don’t see focus. In your resume, your draft of your online presence, and in trying to unite a photo blog about DC with an argument for the Palestinian’s, I see too much confusion. None of this is thinking about the audience. It’s me, me, me, wonderful in all my facets.
ReplyDeleteIt is very evident in your About: West Virginia. Israel. Writing. Art. Travel. Photography. Al Jazeera. DC. The Health Department. The more you include, the less you have.
It is fine to have a personal website or LinkedIn resume uniting all of your facets, but then each facet should be specific and separate, and the resume/homepage should still have some sense of direction. Your resume almost hides a blog on photography, a photostream of photojournalism, a third photostream, and all of your publications.
Let’s quickly scan your resume… Health, DC, PR, I worked in restaurants… shipping? This is what I mean by word choices. You write and decide each step that the reader takes. Highlight your communications experience in all three of your jobs. List the publications experiences as unique jobs and make the details of those experiences greater than anything you ever did for a shipping or finance department. You might want to include series of photographs you took – West Virgina, 200? Israel, 200? – as separate job experiences too.
You could easily make your resume all about communications, even journalism or photography, if you want that kind of job. Drop the “I like a little bit of everything” tone to everything. Your DC blog shouldn’t mention Israel at all.
Your DC blog is your most focused asset, but it’s also pretty generic. Why don’t you incorporate your own photography there? Why have this generic DC photo blog anyway?
A personal photo blog might be what you want to concentrate on for the rest of the semester. I understand the travel East meet West blog, but it feels like another tangent rather than a focus. Your photography unites all of your other interests. But when I go to your photostreams, I see you are a good photographer and that’s all.
A photoblog that puts up one photo or series at a time, with not just captions but descriptions and stories, essays and articles, would trump everything else you have. And those descriptions should be about the photography – why you took the shot – as much or more than they are a diary entry about your life. You could easily intersperse artciels about Leica and HDR.
Again, your DC blog is your most focused project, I just think its missing your personal work.
You can argue with me though. You can argue for East meets West.
I always have a few diarists every semester and my message is always the same. Stop. Edit yourself. Take entire parts of who you are off the web. Forget you and think of the audience and give them one thing well.
Look at Captain Kidd’s blog about her family island. Look at Nigel Hand’s obsession with skepticism. These worlds are personal, but also so specific and unique and interesting, they are liable to catch that larger audience.
I am not asking you to become less, but more you.
Good work.