Guest Blgger Gabrielle Melillo ’15
This class also helped me to develop my understanding of how to work in a collaborative setting when working for a client. The product that my group produced was a booklet on the undergraduate students who are doing research at Elon University and what their research is about – The Undergraduate Research Program Director’s Report 2013. The client that we worked for is a current professor at Elon University and Director of Undergraduate Research, and he pretty much gave us free range to create the best visual product that we could.
Although we did have free range with our layout, we did try to make it correlate to the colors of Elon University. We gathered the information from a survey created for the students and formatted it in a layout that one of the group members created in power point. We did have to change the layout between different students. Some students had pictures and more descriptively asked the questions on the survey; therefore, they received a whole page in which their 
information was presented. Those that did not give us pictures or had shorter answers to the questions that we asked were given smaller pages. We set it up this way because we wanted to include every student who took the time to share the information about his or her research. The image to the right is one of the pages of the students included in the booklet.
Although working in a group was not something new to me, working for a client was. I was working with clients in my other Professional Writing courses at the same time, but it was all so new to me. Producing a document that was so important and that would be published for an audience was a bit stressful. However, I had the great fortune of working with a group in which all members carried their weight while creating this product, and therefore we were not only able to impress our client but also ourselves with the document we created for the Office of Undergraduate Research.
Rhetorically this project was all about appealing to our audience. Not only did my group have to make this product appealing to our client, but also to the audience who would be reading the published product. This audience we decided would be donors of the university, current students, prospective students, and alumni. These audiences would have to be attracted by appealing to their basic understanding of each individual project. Therefore the difficulty for my group was including the basic information, while there were some students were very technical in their responses to our questions. They used jargon that readers would not understand and terms that would not be understood by anyone other than someone in that field. Having multiple audiences in mind helped us to better understand what information was important and how students should be highlighted for their hard work.
Doing this project helped me to learn what experience I need to gain as individual in order to become a good candidate for a future career. It also showed me my development as a student, what I have learned at Elon University, and how to attract the attention of an audience with color and text while keeping a document clean and professional.
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