Changing the World One Word at a Time
Isa Cornelia Elisabeth Oestman Olai
Antioch University
As a girl, growing up in the Eastern Sierra, Holly Harris learned to love and appreciate the outdoors. Amongst open fields, tall mountains, and forever meandering rivers she found her passion––a passion for nature. Throughout her life this passion has been the trail of breadcrumbs––it stayed with her through various jobs, education, and volunteering. She explained to me that she didn’t really plan on becoming an environmental consultant, but she kind of grew into it and her career is something that is constantly evolving. Harris told me, during our conversation over a cup of coffee, that she studied environmental science in college and that much of the interest for nature matured during that time. The love for nature grew into a feeling of obligation to make a difference in this world, but as many others, she didn’t know how to go about it “I have to try my little heart out at everything in life” she expressed with determination and compassion in her voice.
Harris began her professional journey towards change with working for the forest service doing work habitat surveys and restoration ecology. Working for the Forest Service led her on the path of working for the local government, covering legal issues and stopping development from harming precious eco-systems. She finally found her heart at Rincon Consultants, where she feels she can keep her early promise to herself to make a difference in this world. Harris holds firm that in order to make a difference it is important to be kind to yourself and others––it is about helping not preventing, it’s about guiding not opposing. She adds to that point, that to make an impact she has to try to understand and appreciate the audience’s side. Knowing and understanding the audience has become the most important part in Harris’s goal to influence positive change in her field as an environmental consultant and writing is the tool she uses to get there.
All of the writing that Harris does serves a specific purpose and it has to speak to her readers. Understanding the purpose of the writing itself and who the reader is can change the outcome of the projects she is trying to implement. Understanding the purpose is something every writer has to consider before writing, along with personal voice. Bunn, talks about the importance of reading like a writer. In order to do that, you need to understand the purpose of the writing and who it was intended to reach and touch (p.72, 2011). It is a relationship between the reader and the writer, they have to have a conversation through the shared interest, i.e. the writing sample. Why the writing sample is important to read for the intended reader is something that has to be very clear. Graff and Birkenstein explain the importance of making the claims clear, “Not everyone can claim to have the cure for cancer or a solution to end poverty. But writers who fail to show that others should care or already do care about their claims will ultimately lose their audiences’ interest”(p.93, 2009). When Harris writes she has to make clear why her voice is important and why what she writes matters. To have a productive and engaging conversation the reader and the writer have to have a mutual understanding, a common ground to stand on. The common ground can be established through certain moves that the writer applies in the writing sample. Harris explains that most of the time, less is more, “people generally add a lot of words when they write, words that don’t need to be there. I know because I used to do that too, just to sound smart, but it has to be at a level at which my audience can understand and it has to be straight to the point”.
After talking to Harris I also got the impression that making it easier for the reader to understand and connect to the writing is very important, the reader’s interest is easily lost (forever). In order to do just that (make it easy for the reader) Harris uses certain moves as a writer, “people need to be able to read it and understand what is happening at once, so you will want to constantly summarize and make things into bullet points. Having information being organized, clear, and concise is golden when you try to win people over.” Even though Bunn writes about the fact that you as a reader have to understand the intentions of the writer, I believe this goes both ways, as a writer you have to understand your reader. Bunn explains this in a compelling way, “What is it about the way this text is written that makes you respond the way you do?” ( p.72, 2011). He poses an interesting question, you as a writer have to understand what make people tick––what can compel them to read this and then take action? It is an active writing decision, the decision to compel people––to “hook” the reader.
The next step after examining what make people tick, is to as Bunn puts it, “...[understand] what effect these different choices would have on readers” (p.72, 2011). Considering the effect helps the writer to make effective choices and what role those choices play in inspiring change. In the conversation I had with Harris she mentioned how important writerly choices and moves are, she explained how small choices can play a huge role in the bigger picture. Harris brought up an example when a single word played a big role in her life, “I got a Latin name wrong on a plant in a rare plant report that I submitted for a project, the whole project might get sued based on that. Wording and formatting is a big deal in my field of work.” Even though it may seem like a small mistake, that mistake can possibly affect the outcome of the project that Harris worked hard to implement and consequently affect the environment we live in. Words do matter in every little and big way.
To be able to write directly to your reader you need to have an understanding for what they like and what they are looking for in a writing sample. Harris herself knows the importance of this, so much so, that she keeps report outlines that matches what her bosses are looking for, yes, she keeps one for every boss––this, she explains, is one of the ways to make sure that your voice gets heard. The words she writes would easily get discarded if they weren’t written in the way the audience wants to read them. I think that is something that we all face on a daily basis, the things we read have to appeal to us, just as much as products we buy. How arguments are written to persuade is well-pictured by Lunsberg, Ruszkiewicz, and Walters, they state, “In many situations, writers want not only to convince audiences but to move them to action, whether that involves buying a product, voting for a candidate, or supporting a policy.”( p.9, 2012). Taste is crucial to consider when writing for a specific demographic. We all know what we like, without considering for what reason we like it. Therefore it is up to the writer to understand what the audience likes, just like it is up to the marketer to understand why we buy certain products. And just like the marketer knows that the understanding of the consumer makes the difference in the decision of a purchase, the writer faces the same considerations and has to apply his or her words to readers preferences in order to get them to read it.
In Harris’s line of work many eyes screen her writing before it touches down at the end of the line––the decision makers table. The written report is first circulated in the public. The public will then provide comments on it, those comments will be forwarded to the city council together with the report. The city council decides if they want to approve the project or not. Harris has learned the hard way how to influence the decision makers through her writing. She does just that, through boiling down the information for them and write it in the language of their policies, “my writing often includes taking really complex material, gathering it, and then distilling it into two pages so the readers can say, for example: oh, there’s a special kind of grass here, does it grow other places or just here? Would this cause a significant effect on the ecology or not?”. In addition to clear and concise materials Harris’s readers like open white spaces in a text, a combination of capturing words and pictures, and they like to see the main points made into bullets. It becomes even more clear what Harris’s readers preferences are when looking at some of the habitat reports she has written. The reports clearly state the intention of the project at the top, to make it easy for the reader to understand exactly what the writer is asking for. The reports also inform the reader what to expect from it and where to find it. Again, it is clear to me from talking to Harris and reading her reports that it is about guiding the reader through the text and the process––the author has to hold the reader’s hand and lead him/her through the forest of words and sentences and make sure that they find their way through. And that they didn’t forget to bring the main points and a call to action with them. It is constant work to try to appeal to the tastes, needs, and wants of the reader, but ultimately it serves a higher purpose, at least for Harris and that is why it is so important to her––her writing influences people to make better decisions and consequently to save lives.
When Harris came walking into the coffee shop at seven o’clock that night, she looked tired, just as tired as anyone would look after trying to save the world all day. When she spoke, she spoke with exhaustion, but somewhere in there, there was a light of hope and determination. Saving the world or trying to make a difference is no easy job and it includes a lot of responsibility. Harris is responsible for both sides of a never-ending conversation. She tries to protect the underdog––the guys that most people don’t care about but are so important to the eco-systems we live in––animals, plants, trees, you name it! Harris does everything in her power to save them from being demolished by apartment complexes, parking lots, and shopping malls. But not only does she protect the underdog, she tries to make the developers happy, because as she stated before it is not about preventing or opposing, it is about guiding––we all have to live and thrive together, but we need each other to do that.
Harris considers her choices everyday in order to be as effective as possible as a writer. She has learned through years of experience and an attentive ability to hear her audience, understand what is most important to them, and how she can get her voice heard. Ultimately, for Harris, it all comes down to the end-goal, to make a change. Her writing has a higher purpose beyond writing moves, conventions, genres, and structure, but without them and without an understanding for them, she wouldn’t be able to speak her mind clearly through her writing and influence people to take a stand. To write effectively as an environmental consultant is a highly complex thing, because, really, it’s about knowing your reader––it is about understanding and getting to know a person and then affect them in such a way that they will be inspired to impact change.
