I am a versatile writer with experience in a wide variety of styles, formats, audiences, and clients. My services include research, writing, editing, and basic document design and layout. Please review the samples below to get an idea of what I can do for you.
Page Contents:
Policy Analysis, Needs Assessment & Surveying
Medicare Part D: Impact Assessment
Public-health planners in Baltimore, responsible for allocating some $20 million in federal funds for low-income HIV services annually, needed to know how their clients would be affected by the new Medicare Part D prescription-drug benefit that debuted in January 2006. I answered this question both in terms of the actual wording of the new law (i.e., in an ideal world, how is this benefit supposed to work?), as well as by tracking and analyzing the technical problems that plagued the program’s rollout (i.e., how smoothly is the implementation working?). This report demonstrates my ability to deliver authoritative, high-quality analysis for use in a high-stakes planning process. My research sources for this project included government and NPO white papers, mainstream media coverage and analysis, and extensive meetings and interviews with state health officials. (For InterGroup Services, Inc..) :: PDF ::
Service Needs of Children, Youth, and Families: Baltimore County, Md.
Maryland counties are required by the state to assess the health-, social-, and protective-service needs of their resident children, youth, and families as part of an ongoing strategic-planning process. The resulting reports, which might be described as “report cards of children’s health,” describe the current status of a variety of indicators of health and well-being in the given county, compare the county to similar, neighboring counties, and present an improvement plan. A project of this sort involves not only locating, analyzing, and presenting relevant data from the U.S. Census Bureau, various state and county agencies, and research journals and other secondary sources, but also planning, organizing, and conducting focus-group research, telephone polling, and strategy meetings between representatives of county agencies and departments. This particular report, released in 2005, was prepared for Baltimore County, Maryland. (For InterGroup Services, Inc..) :: PDF ::
Service Needs of Children, Youth, and Families: Prince George’s County, Md.
Just like the above-described Baltimore County project, this report is a comprehensive community assessment of the service needs of children, youth, and families, conducted this time for Prince George’s County, Maryland. As mentioned above, a project of this sort involves not only locating, analyzing, and presenting relevant data from the U.S. Census Bureau, various state and county agencies, and research journals and other secondary sources, but also planning, organizing, and conducting focus-group research, telephone polling, and strategy meetings between representatives of county agencies and departments. (For InterGroup Services, Inc..) :: PDF ::
Teen Sexual Knowledge and Behavior: Prince George’s County, Md.
Also for the Prince George’s County Commission for Children, Youth and Families, I wrote a report on the results of a young people’s reproductive-health survey. In addition to preparing the report, I planned and supervised the face-to-face administration of the 70-question survey to more than 400 students on two college campuses. In both the initial negotiations with campus administrators and the “cold approaches” on potential respondents, this process required tact, discretion, and a high degree of professionalism, as the questionnaire concerned respondents’ sexual practices and reproductive-health knowledge. (For InterGroup Services, Inc..) :: PDF ::
Independent Research and Personal Essays
Academic Research
I became interested in the intersection of food and culture while still an undergraduate and, in the years after graduating, published this “farm-to-fork” commodity-chain analysis of the Quaker Oats brand in the peer-reviewed academic journal Food, Culture & Society, an unusual undertaking for a non-academic. The paper looks at the Quaker Oats brand’s cultural significance, marketing history, and place in consumers’ imaginations. Research sources included media coverage, interviews with government officials, corporate annual reports, company marketing materials, videos of archived commercials from past decades, and a 40-year-old issue of Business Week magazine that solved an otherwise seemingly intractable historical puzzle. In addition to showing my ability to gain my footing in a subject I was previously unfamiliar with, this paper is a good example of the strong voice and style I can bring to a project that does not require a dryly objective tone. :: PDF ::
Personal Essay
I don’t just write journalism, policy reports, and marketing material. This essay, “Getting Hitched,” considers the many possible motivations different people may feel for joining the military. What was mine? Hint: it has to do with young, male chimpanzees. :: PDF ::
Facility Profiles
In 2004 and 2005, I was a regular contributor of “facility profiles” to Recreation Management, a magazine specializing in “ideas and solutions for recreation, sports, and fitness facility managers.” Facility profiles could be described as case studies, detailing how one of these ideas or solutions — whether technical, fiscal, or operational — was implemented at a given facility. Below are several samples of my work for this magazine.
• “Building Dreams in Baltimore: Leadership Through Athletics”
• “Good Pointe: The Keller Pointe Recreation Center”
• “Starring Role in the Community: Starpointe Residents Club at Estrella Mountain Ranch”
Lifestyle Journalism
Baltimore Magazine serves the suburban residents around the city of Baltimore with entertaining and useful features, including lifestyle pieces such as my 2005 article about making and keeping a trio of New Year’s resolutions: quit smoking, lose weight, and run a marathon (this third one isn’t as crazy as it sounds, but you’ll have to read the article to find out more). To research this piece, I identified and interviewed not only local experts in smoking cessation, weight loss, and sports training, but also everyday folks with insights to offer concerning their own experiences working to accomplish these goals. :: PDF ::
Performance Review
Baltimore’s High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music is a one-of-a-kind event that would challenge just about anyone’s conception of what a music festival — indeed, music itself — should sound like. To cover the weekend-long festival for British music magazine The Wire, I immersed myself in over 20 hours of concert performances, tagged along for spontaneous, guerrilla musical events here and there throughout the city, visited “sound installations” in local art galleries, and met with many of the musicians for one-on-one interviews. Festival organizers must have agreed with my description of the event as an “utterly confounding yet utopian vision of music’s possibilities”; they’ve used this phrase as a tag line on their promotional materials ever since. :: PDF ::
Book Reviews
While at the University of Maryland, I completed all coursework necessary to obtain Maryland teacher certification. Though I did not end up becoming a teacher, I have remained fascinated by the subject, both the practice of teaching and the politically charged issues that swirl around education. Below are two book reviews I wrote for the education journal Radical Teacher.
• Review of Education, Inc.: Turning Learning Into a Business, by Alfie Kohn and Patrick Shannon
• Review of Closing the Book on Homework, by John Buell
Project Management and Editing
Consumer Survey
From September 2006-May 2007, I managed a large-scale survey of consumers of low-income HIV services for the Greater Baltimore HIV Health Services Planning Council, a mayoral panel responsible for the allocation of some $20 million in federal HIV funding annually. Work for this project — a face-to-face interview-based survey administered on-site at more than two dozen health-care-provider locations throughout Baltimore and contacting over 600 respondents — included: the hiring, training, and supervision of one full-time junior researcher, 14 temporary interviewers, and two temporary data-entry specialists; supervision of a Filemaker Pro-development consultant in designing a database for survey responses; compliance with federal HIPAA regulations concerning confidentiality of health records; and managing a respondent-incentive budget of over $6,000. (The report on this project is currently in press.)
Public-Health Policy Research
Also starting in September 2006, and continuing through August 2007, I managed a policy-research project concerning best practices for engaging and retaining HIV-positive people in medical care, also for the Baltimore planning council (see above item for more information about this client). For this project, I directed the research of a junior staff member and worked on the editing and design team for the final publication. :: PDF ::
Marketing and Public Relations
Newsletters and Press Releases
In 2004, I was contracted on an occasional basis (a good solution for small organizations with limited budgets) to provide editing and writing services for a non-profit arts venue called Creative Alliance at the Patterson. I wrote press releases and text for seasonal newsletters/event schedules that went out to the organization’s members.
• Newsletter feature: “Underground Film Macgyver”
• Newsletter feature: “Thanks, Christie!”
• Newsletter: Sample Event Descriptions”
• Sample Press Release
Trifold Brochures
As a research assistant for the University of Maryland’s Elementary Science Integration Projects, I wrote and edited a wide range of materials, including newsletters, children’s book reviews, presentations for conferences, and web copy, as well as proofreading and editing scholarly articles submitted for the book Crossing Borders in Literacy and Science Instruction: Perspectives in Theory and Practice. In addition, I prepared publicity materials for the project, including trifold brochures such as the two samples below.
• ESIP brochure
• “Kids Inquiry Conference” brochure
Business To Business Portfolio
A high-end real-estate development company needed a portfolio of its past projects to share with possible partners, funders, and government stakeholders. I wrote brief descriptions of each project, including positive quotes from media coverage where available. :: PDF ::