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Contacts

Services

Red Dog Writers Group provides the following:

Writing – We write public relations materials (press releases, press kits), website content, newsletters, brochures, feature articles, project proposals, technical manuals and reports, and annual reports.  Clients have the options of providing us with all of the necessary background information to complete the assignment or engaging us in the pre-writing processes of concept development and research.

Editing – We edit all the kinds of documents and publications listed above as well as book manuscripts. 

Proofreading – We provide proofreading services.

Consultation – We offer consultation services to help institutions, organizations, and nonprofits evaluate their existing communications strategies and develop plans for improvement. 

Project Management / Editorial Oversight – We provide project management and editorial oversight for projects requiring coordination of subcontractors (writers, designers, photographers, videographers, etc.). 

Julia Van Develder

Long-time resident of the Hudson Valley, Julia Van Develder began working in the Office of College Relations at Vassar College in 1990 as a staff writer and was the editorial director from 1998 until 2008 when she left to launch Red Dog Writers Group.  At Vassar, she was responsible for establishing and maintaining the college’s editorial style, writing/editing numerous college publications, collaborating with designers and photographers, supervising staff and student writers, art directing photo and video shoots, initiating and implementing focus groups and readership surveys, managing special projects, and creating content for numerous feature websites.

Van Develder is also a poet, an essayist, and a screenwriter.  Her script THE ESCAPE ARTIST won the Final Draft 2005 International Screenwriting Competition and is currently optioned.  Her first script, STAYING AFLOAT, is also optioned and looks promising for production in 2009. 

Van Develder has a few degrees (Oberlin College, 1974; Teachers College, Columbia, 1975), four grown kids, one grandkid (who has his own YouTube site: http://www.YouTube.com/babybenito), and two labradoodles.

Jim Andrews

Originally from Arkansas, Jim Andrews has 20 years of book and magazine experience, most recently as editor of New York House magazine.  Under his direction, House evolved from a real estate showcase into an influential publication focusing on green, sustainable building design and Smart Growth development in the Hudson Valley.

Prior to his position at House, Andrews was the managing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine in New York City.  During his six years there, he oversaw all text and photos of this monthly magazine and headed its redesign, a year-long project completed in 2002.

Other New York credentials include posts at English Education, the national research journal of Teachers College, Columbia University (where Andrews earned his MA in 1997), and at G.P. Putnam’s Sons, where he was assistant to the managing editor and worked on books by Charles Kuralt, Carl Hiaasen, Tom Clancy, and others.

Andrews and his daughter, Sophie, live in Barrytown, NY.

Jim Guilianelli

Jim Guilianelli has been a writer and editor at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY, for 25 years.  Currently, he is the executive editor of the IBM z/OS Hot Topics magazine, a biennial publication for mainframe programmers and aficionados throughout the computer industry. Recently, the magazine won two awards from the Society for Technical Communications for technical excellence. Visit the z/OS Hot Topics website.

Originally from Erie, PA, Guilianelli holds a BA in English from Northwestern University and an MA in English and Linguistics from Indiana University.  He is a resident of the beautiful Hudson Valley where he spends his free time hiking its trails and making numerous excursions to NYC for the opera and other cultural events.

Lorrie Klosterman

Lorrie Klosterman writes and teaches about a variety of topics, especially the biological and environmental sciences, health, and nature. She earned a BS in zoology at Oregon State University and a PhD in zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to fund graduate research. She pursued postdoctoral training in cell biology, physiology, and endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, University of Alberta (as a NATO scholar), and Boston University.

Klosterman moved to the Hudson Valley in 1988 and established a writing career focusing on science and the environment, including for the biomedical arena (journal articles, slide presentations, video scripts) and for popular journalism. She has written numerous articles for House magazine and Chronogram magazine (for which she has been Whole Living editor for four years), and over a dozen science and health books for young readers (grades 3-12) for Marshall Cavendish. She has also enjoyed teaching a host of biological science courses as an adjunct at Boston University, Marist College, Mount Saint Mary College, Vassar College, and SUNY New Paltz.

Klosterman’s greatest passion is the wondrous world of nature, from its grandest viewscapes to its tiniest details. She is an animal advocate, watercolorist, sometime actress, aspiring scriptwriter, and a proud mother.

Our Approach

At Red Dog Writers Group, we use a simple model to analyze every act of communication we undertake on behalf of our clients. We look at five elements:

• the sender—the person or organization transmitting a message
• the message—what the sender wishes to communicate
• the receiver—the audience the sender wants to reach
• the channel—the means the sender uses to transmit the message
• noise—anything and everything that has the potential to interfere with the successful transmission of the message

Simple.

And complex. The first three elements are fairly straightforward. Who are you? What do you want to get across?  Who are you trying to reach? It’s the client’s job (with the writer’s help) to articulate these three elements. It’s the writer’s job (with the client’s input) to identify the channel, craft the message, and eliminate potential sources of noise. 

The beauty of this model is that it applies to both simple, straightforward assignments and complicated assignments.  Whether the task is a direct mail brochure or an annual report or an op-ed piece or a website, this model helps the client and the writer work together to create a focused and effective act of communication.

A word about noise.  Noise can be anything.  If the goal of your brochure is to attract the general public to your art exhibition, an overly scholarly tone is noise.  If the goal is to attract scholars to your symposium, an informal tone might be noise.

Our particular skill is in developing the channel--finding an imaginative and engaging way to communicate the message.  Usually this involves writing a text of some kind, but sometimes it involves finding a different way to tell the story.  Read on for a specific example…

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Here’s an example of how this model works:

Sender and Receiver
In focus groups with prospective students, Vassar kept hearing that students wanted to know what it was like to live at Vassar—what the dorms were like, what the social life was like, etc.  In this situation, Vassar is the sender, and prospective students are the receivers.

The Message
The message the college wanted to get across to prospectives is that student life at Vassar is created by students.  Vassar students come from everywhere and have a zillion interests, passions, and perspectives---and that multiplicity is student life at Vassar. 

The Channel
We considered developing a student life publication to communicate this message, but about the same time, YouTube came into existence, offering numerous possibilities for communicating about student life and other aspects of the college.

YouTube offered us an enhanced site (no time limit on videos and up to 1GB per video), and we developed a Vassar YouTube presence, focused largely on student life--brief interviews with students, videos profiling student organizations, comedy troupes, dance performances, and the like. 

Creating the YouTube site did involve writing, as you can see if you visit the site---the description of the institution, titles and descriptions of the videos, etc.  It also involved storytelling--creating a mini-story in each video about the person or organization featured; art directing the shoots and the editing; and collaborating with Vassar’s graphic designers. 

Noise
The main source of potential noise was inauthenticity.  We wanted to avoid a highly scripted, institutional “voice” because prospective students are very media savvy and know when they are being sold.  Plus—we didn’t want to sell them.  We wanted Vassar to sell them. 

The Outcome
Vassar was the first of its peers (selective liberal arts colleges) to have a fully developed YouTube channel. In the first year, these videos received over 100,000 “views”--and that’s not counting the Quidditch video, which “went viral” and received over 100,000 hits.  Many of these videos also serve a dual purpose because they’re embedded in the Vassar admissions website.