New Perspectives

Reflection

As I look back on my ghostwriting experience, I realized how ignorant I was in last week’s blog post. I assumed it was easy when I just began to write. However, I failed in listening to the wise words of Scot. What was easy, which made me assume this project would be simple, was my knowledge of Billy and how he would present an argument. I know his style and his approach to presenting an argument to people. It was easy to structure the sentences in a way that presented his mannerisms. What was hard? First of all, the aspects of his information made it difficult to represent properly because of my lack of experience in the field of ghostwriting. Some of his information was cited using Wikipedia. This puzzled me because I was unsure of whether to use this information when writing his speech. However, these were his ideas and I went along with it. Also, the beginning contained a piece about the Greek titans. This was knowledge that Billy already knew about thus he said he didn’t cite it because it was something he didn’t even have to look up; he just used it as an analogy. So, do I cite this information if I had no knowledge about this Greek myth? This is his speech and in writing a speech for him, I decided to not include a citation. Secondly, as I found out, the specifics were the most troubling to figure out. For one, the most compelling part was to decide how I can integrate my style of writing into the speech. In his past papers and speeches he has wrote, his grammatical style and compressed word bank limited his ability to produce a quality paper. In ghostwriting for Billy, I had to figure out how I was going to compose the paper in a way that represented Billy’s style, but also a quality paper that he could use. I then thought about any president’s speech and realized that a ghostwriter produced a quality speech whether or not that president could produce his own work in such a manner. In my job as a ghostwriter, I have to make Billy seem as prominent of a person as I can. Next was my decision to format his paper to into a more considerate paper. He explained to me about the argument he was presenting and I realized that he had a hard nosed argument. He had not considered any other point of view. To be effective and appeal to people that are opponents of stem cell research, one must consider other people’s points of view. So I decided to consider other’s points of view and relay questions back to the audience. Many questions came about. Is this part of a ghostwriter’s job or would peppering a paper with your style and changing the voice of the paper stepping outside of a ghostwriters bounds? In my final decision I decided to be effective, I had to integrate these pieces into his paper. To finish up, my perception of ghostwriting has changed a lot compared to my perception last week. Ghostwriters must make a wide array of decisions compared to a paper that one writes for himself. However, the time consuming part of researching and finding information is literally cut in half. Additionally, I have developed an idea on the wide array of writing styles and ideas of writing that are not apparent on the surface (For example reading two different books). I assumed and thought from just reading in general that many writers were somewhat similar in techniques and other aspects of writing; perhaps only their uses and variety of words differing. Now, I believe writing is almost as autonomous as DNA is from person to person.