I Am the Signifier and the Signified
Confessions of a 25-Year Journey as a Professional Writer
Prologue: The Stories Our Words Tell
Recently, I took an unconventional approach to portfolio building: I fed samples from twenty years of my professional writing into AI analysis tools to discover patterns in my work. What emerged had crossed disciplines, voices, and evolving relationships with the identity a writer creates through her writing. From technical documentation to brand narratives, each phase has contributed to a deeper understanding of how authentic writing builds worlds that connect us all.
Chapter 1: Genres With Consequence
Blood, Gore, and Death in the Tragedy of Macbeth
From 1998 until I graduated, I had a part-time stint as an editorial assistant at a world-renowned medical journal. There I discovered that translating nephrology submissions was easier than reading Shakespeare and honestly, it was a lot more interesting.
What seemed purely scientific revealed itself as deeply metaphorical. Biology spoke in poetry it didn't recognize. The body was the stage for many battles where cells were anthropomorphized into communicators, renal functions into fighters. Here my undergraduate thesis emerged:
A Metaphorical Analysis of Nephrology Journal Articles
The scientific method as a genre had clear winners—rejected, major revision, minor revision, accepted. Could the words someone used really mean medical breakthroughs would be rejected from being shared with the world? If exceedingly clinical writing was still persuasive, what other magic did other worlds of words hold? Rhetoric felt like the key to a fourth dimension laid bare. It was everywhere, but no one else seemed to notice, or care.
Here was writing with real-world consequences: language choices determined whether vital research would reach the scientific community or remain hidden in rejected manuscripts. What began as a part-time job became an initiation into the power of professional writing, where form and function merged into something greater than either could achieve alone.
Chapter 2: Exposing Composition
Advanced Expository Writing: Spring Syllabus
In the beginning, creative writing and literature were knowns. Business writing I’d learned on the job as an editorial assistant. I’d take in total three courses on Shakespeare and many others in literature, but exposition was hidden in the corners where traditional academia didn’t often prompt one to look. And this is the type of writing that actually really stuck.
Let me set the stage: It’s 1999. I’m attending the first day of my first class dedicated exclusively to expository writing. “Which of these is the A paper, the B paper, the C paper,” Professor Lazaro asks, then reads aloud three versions with similar meaning but differing presentations of it. Two hands are raised for paper C. “It isn’t hiding,” I explained when he asked why I selected the paper with the least flourish. I was new to this study of exposition, but I was already ahead.
In poetry we learned to use metaphor, paradox, syntax, meter, and rhyme. This felt like poetry without adjectives, built fully with only the essential elements of style. Exposition treats words like surgical tools. It strips away constructing and reconstructing so that writing is a way of thinking. I was enamored, and exposition would be the path I chose next.
Chapter 3: Engineering Translation
Sun Cluster Data Services Installation & Configuration Guide
In June of 2000, I started my first full-time gig as a technical writer. At Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), I documented clustered data arrays. Language was code, with each word selected for maximum precision and efficiency. If my earlier self played with words, I now built with them.
In Menlo Park's sprawling campus, I wrote, edited, and published a technical implementation manual, collected best practices into the team’s style guide, and helped with studies in human-computer interaction. Words became products with release schedules, quality assurance, and user feedback loops.
The writing was dry, but it reached far beyond my keyboard and gave me a sense of accomplishment in rapid learning and human-computer journeys. Maybe this form of writing was…too expository?
Chapter 4: Scholarly Folly
Master of Science in Rhetoric & Communication
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Full Scholarship & Teaching Assistantship
I made a mistake I’m grateful for, leaving my job at Sun to get an advanced degree I didn’t need on paper but that would very much give me the tools I use everyday as a writer today. Studying the other edge of writing found in rhetoric, I sought out deeper layers in Ivy-adjacent forums.
Situated near science and technology studies with anthropologists and philosophers, electronic artists and digital rebels, I questioned everything. I was studying linguistics, semiotics, cultural theory, in a way that deconstructed my own sense of feeling like I knew what things meant. A year and a half later, I had another degree but faced terrible job prospects and mountain financial concerns.
My studies may have been paid for but theories were not going to pay my bills. I ended up having no real choice but to move back to my parents’ house or rejoin the hustle as a technical writer, both of which I very much wanted to escape.
Chapter 5: Selling Certainty
Virus outbreaks can cripple your WAN infrastructure. We keep it secure.
The good news was, I was now both rhetorician and technical writer, and that was a path that led me to marketing and brand very quickly. Studying who I considered to be the industry juggernauts, I crafted systems of meaning that lasted and words that generated results.
Solutions without upgrades.
Pitches were possibility and promise. I knew how to transform language into revenue, making startup QoS Networking into a powerhouse digital presence for its time and size.
Most optimization efforts begin with a phone call—fix things fast.
Using the format of the white paper, I embedded storytelling and metaphor into persuasive pieces, both design and copy. I used the science of communication research to construct Likert scales for surveys and unique frameworks like end user research ratings.
The result? International press coverage through a very fruitful partner with a much larger tech firm. I had learned the science of meaning but it was much more fun to apply it and see results. In fact, that was what I really wanted—to do things with words; to feel powerful through them. I didn’t fully appreciate how I was instrumentalizing language, seeing words only as means rather than ends in themselves.
Chapter 6: Shape-Shifting
It's PM somewhere. You do the celebrating. We'll do the ads.
After leaving the tech world, I discovered that technical marketing writing credentials didn't travel well in smaller cities. The opportunities narrowed dramatically in places where showing up "bright and hungry at 8am" was still the primary currency.
I sought a permanent job, and ironically it was in writing for a contingent staffing company. And in a new form that I could now master: proposal writing. Within eighteen months of joining the firm, I had transformed from novice to the company's most decorated proposal writer. Though I found the staffing industry itself uninspiring, I discovered a genuine fascination with crafting arguments that could secure deals worth upwards of $500 million monthly.
The stakes were extraordinary. I ascended to become one of the top two proposal writers for what was then the world's largest staffing firm, with my most significant win bringing in $180 million. Every day was a pressure cooker of deadlines and expectations. Unlike those people who somehow manage crushing workloads with apparent ease, I visibly wore my stress. I aged a decade in half that time, surviving on four hours of sleep while crafting language that underwent microscopic scrutiny.
“Because you wrote this well, we can now do business with Linde... Nike... Apple... Honda... Exxon Mobile... Dr. Pepper Snapple Group”—words that literally translated to millions in revenue. My sentences seemed to unlock corporate treasures.
By 2016, the relentless pressure of this "each-word-earns-millions-of-dollars" existence had worn me down. While I had mastered the craft, writing had become joyless—a technical skill rather than a creative outlet. Content writing beckoned as a potential escape, promising the creative freedom I craved.
But pivoting proved daunting. After years in high-stakes corporate writing, the typical entry points seemed impossible. Creative directors treated copywriters like personal assistants—coffee-fetchers beneath the creative hierarchy. The thought of surrendering my hard-won expertise for such treatment was unthinkable. I found myself trapped in a paradox: too experienced for entry-level positions, too old for internships, and too burned out to project the effortless cool that creative agencies seemed to require.
My writing had shape-shifted from academic to technical to corporate, but the most challenging transformation lay ahead: finding a path that would restore the joy of writing while honoring the expertise I'd gained.
Chapter 7: Seeing Deeper
Food is culture. It’s a part of our heritage that can quickly disappear without your help.
It took some time. I had the luck to volunteer with GastroFest, a fabulous food festival that was hungry for extra hands who could heap on elevated copy and design for their robust event marketing needs. Ever held an event that needed to draw in thousands of locals to succeed? How do you get the word out? Get funding? I got to help design ads and write copy.
Around 2020, my relationship with writing underwent its most profound transformation, as I stepped fully into a marketing role. Where once I sold fortunes through proposals, I now sought to see and reveal deeper truths of what a brand truly meant and what futures we could envision and create in presenting a business to the world as a thoughtful, mindful, passionate persona. I evolved from making arguments to creating possibilities…from making money to making meaning (getting paid, yes, but for the aesthetic the words build, the stories they tell, the future they make possible).
Still thinking on the page, I find myself here. Not the hustler or the expert, but the observer, the connector, the meaning-maker.
i am the signifier and the signified.
no one comes to being without me.
in the mystery of moment I dissolv
e
into the cosmos of brand
breathing whispers into fire.
Writing can be formulas and strategies, but it can also be simply “self.” Clarity arrives in the doing, a continuous growth state not a lump-sum windfall. I've moved from selling certainty to seeing only its opposite, from pursuing perfection to championing vulnerability.
the evolution theorized in their eyes and the ryes
best enjoyed after the pours are pored,
the brand building corporate worlds through
even such words
Epilogue: Reflection
My words have built technical systems, academic arguments, million-dollar proposals, and brand identities. But perhaps the most important thing they've built is a path for me to move from using language as a tool to experiencing it as a way of being.
I am the signifier and the signified, both the writing as creator and the writer that creates. Each word written has, in turn, written me.
