Technical Writing

Although my portfolio mainly focuses on mapping, I also wanted to include some examples of my writing skills.

The first piece of writing that I want to showcase is a report I helped write on the water adjudication process in Washington State. This was of particular relevance at the time because the state Department of Ecology was just beginning the adjudication process for Water Resources Inventory Area (WRIA) 1, which Bellingham is a part of. In addition to general proofreading and analysis, I also wrote the section that explores the background of water adjudications in Washington (pp. 9-15). As part of this I researched and summarized the adjudication process surrounding the Yakima River between 1977 and 2021, the historical and current context surrounding WRIA 1, and created overview maps showing where the relevant WRIAs were located.

The second piece of writing I wanted to showcase here is an essay I wrote for a class on the role of science in the policy making process. This essay was intended to summarize the two readings (Jasanoff, 1996; Nowotny, 2003) and place them in the context of other readings from the class. Rather than creating my own argument, my goal for this essay was to convey the author's arguments in a clear and non-judgemental manner.

The final report that I want to showcase is the result of a classwide effort to map the accessibility of a trail within the Arboretum at Western Washington University. We were given a very vague prompt and had to organize ourselves as a class to decide on deliverables and how we were going to produce those deliverables. In addition to helping out with the report I also created the 20-meter segments of trail that were used in our analysis, as well as helping to create the field map forms and then collect data using those forms.