Changing Exceptions and Unexpected Skills

Starting off on this project I expected to make short documentary films about different aspects of the history of the Chinsegut Plantation. Well, due to my own inexperience, equipment delays and just being short on time, that hasn’t happened yet. It is still on the back burner, and I (we) will get to it when there is time, but after the internship is over. However, what I have been putting my time into outside of learning the tour presentation are graphics. This fall as the tourist season picks up the historic site to expand the number and types of tours that we provide. One of which is a self-guided tour that will be offered at a discounted price point. The self-guided tour will need interpretive graphics to highlight various points about the individuals, families and events that are pertinent to the story of the manor house. Graphics, it turns out, are not as easy as they look. The visual aspect of they are fairly straight forward to me. I have been able to fairly quickly pull together visual information, in this case photographs, that highlights the text. The text, however, is the hard part. Pretty sure I have already lamented about this type of writing but here’s some more. The goal is in about a hundred words preferably less, the average person reads 75-90 words in 30 seconds, convey everything you want the reader to know about a complex and dynamic subject that they likely have no background in without any analysis or opinions and keep their attention to the end. It sounds easy, but it’s not. At least for me. There always is too much information that seems to be necessary to make the point you want but not enough words to say it or at least being able to say it in a way that will keep the reader's attention for half a minute. Of the skills that I have worked on this summer, this is the one that has been the most frustrating and useful. Being concise in my writing is not something I excel at. If it can said in a word I will circle around it twenty. In that respect, being able to work on the graphics for these tours has been a very useful exercise. It is forcing me to rethink how I write and the way that I convey information. The writing skill is one that I will be able to use regardless of what direction I go after school, and it is one that I didn’t expect to gain or even knew I needed.