- Maker: Isabella (Izzy) Gomez
- Genre: Business Presentation
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5400: Technical Writing
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Fall 2025
Description
This project establishes the interactive client onboarding presentation for Only Impact (a local marketing agency), designed to facilitate in-person and virtual kick-off meetings. While the agency’s previous identity as “Spike Media Miami” relied on a clean, traditionally corporate aesthetics, this rebrand introduces a bold “street-style,” urban visual identity to better align with a target demographic of local creators, businesses, and community-oriented organizations. Developing this presentation required transitioning the agency from static, text-heavy documents to a visual narrative that guides clients through a transparent four-phase workflow: Discover, Design, Develop, and Deliver. This presentation is designed to be presented by agency leadership, helping to demystify complex marketing strategies for non-technical clients by including aspects such as the “yearbook-style” team profiles and localized case studies. For an agency that prioritizes community connection, this presentation ensures that the critical onboarding phase remains as personable and authentic as the brand itself.
Reflection
When designing this presentation, I consciously moved away from the traditional “positivist” idea that technical writing has to be cold or impersonal. Instead, I leaned into Miller’s concept of “enculturation” by adopting the rebrand’s bold, urban, “street-style” visual identity to show that the agency is an authentic part of its clients’ community (617). This choice reflects the understanding that writing well isn’t just about mechanics; it is about matching the values and style of the people you are talking to (Miller 617). I intentionally broke the “windowpane theory” rule (which says language should be invisible) to create a “persuasive version of experience” that values building a real relationship over just passing along information (Miller 616).
Moving from static documents to a narrative slideshow also gave me the chance to use Wall and Spinuzzi’s “selling without selling” strategy (138). I mixed different genres, blending together aspects like personable yearbook-style team photos with hard data in the client spotlights slides, to create a “genre ecology” that proves the agency’s value through expertise rather than aggressive sales pitches (Wall and Spinuzzi 141). By arranging these different pieces into “persuasive pathways,” the presentation guides clients through a “funnel” of trust(Wall and Spinuzzi 150). This strategy ultimately help bring the agency and I’s goal to life, transforming the presentation into a document that serves a human purpose rather than just a technical one.
Works Cited
Miller, Carolyn R. “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.” College English, vol. 40, no. 6, 1979, pp. 610-17.
Wall, Amanda, and Clay Spinuzzi. “The Art of Selling-without-Selling: Understanding the Genre Ecologies of Content Marketing.” Technical Communication Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2, 2018, pp. 137-60.
