My Ghostwriting Reflection

I had a very positive ghostwriting experience. I chose to write for a very close friend of mine, who is in the nursing program at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She is a Certified Nursing Assistant and has another year left in the program before she obtains her degree in nursing. The writing task that we decided to do is an essay about her personal values and beliefs as a nurse. She has never had to do a formal paper on her values, but she says that it has been the topic of discussion in several of her courses. We chose this assignment because I wanted to write something important to her that represents who she is as a person. This writing task also gave me an opportunity to learn about her experiences in the nursing profession.

I believe that our interaction in the writing process of this essay made our relationship stronger. After agreeing on a topic, I asked her about her core values in a fairly in-depth interview over the phone. She talked to me about her specific beliefs and how she uses them in her profession. I was shocked when she described a shift she worked in the Cardiac Care Unit where a patient that she was assigned to died unexpectedly due to heart complications. She witnessed the medical staff trying to revive him and watched his life end. She struggled to compose herself in order to console his family and continue her shift providing proper care to her other patients. She told me about other intense incidents that occurred during her experience working in Hospice and how these situations have changed her as a person. We are very close, yet I was hearing about these experiences for the first time and it made me realize that I would not have been able to maintain composure and contain my emotions in these instances. The interview allowed me to learn more about her as a person and increased my respect for her. This portion of my ghostwriting experience also alerted me to the fact that we do not usually talk about her job as a nurse because she may have thought that it would not be interesting to me. I really enjoyed hearing about her values as a nurse and am going to continue talking to her about her experiences in the program because it plays a tremendous role in her life and it reveals who she is as a person.

The actual writing of the essay was both hard and easy. We attended the same high school and took the same writing courses so our writing structure is very similar. We were both taught to have an introduction, conclusion, and body paragraphs that begin with a topic sentence that indicates what will be contained in the paragraph. When I began writing the essay, it was going faster than I had anticipated. I took detailed notes during the interview which provided me with enough material to write about so I did not have to make up her opinions or guess what her values are. Also, due to our similar writing structures, I was able to set up the essay how I normally would. The most difficult process of the writing experience occurred after I completed the first draft of the essay. We both had busy weeks so it was hard to find a time that worked for us to go over the corrections she made on the draft I sent her. It was also frustrating to me that she did not have time to read it on the day that I emailed it to her because I was hoping to complete the assignment somewhat early because I had assignments for other classes I had to get started on.

After she read the essay, we talked over the phone about the changes she made to the draft. The majority of the changes she made were word choice corrections. In the draft I created, there were words that she does not use in her writing vocabulary so she put in words that she would normally use. She also changed specific words in order to make the essay flow better and sound more like her. An example of this is that I use transitions between my body paragraphs such as “in addition to.” She crossed that out and suggested that I use “another value…” because she would not use that transition in her writing. She added more information about certain experiences that I talked about in the paper and added a few sentences about content that we did not cover in the interview. This was very helpful because it provided more examples of how she demonstrates her core values as a nurse and made the paper stronger.

My ethical opinions of ghostwriting did not change during this process. The entire time I was working on her essay I did not have ethical concerns because I knew that she was not going to be turning in the essay for a course or using it for anything. Knowing this helped me focus on the task at hand and not worry that I was doing something wrong or doing something that could have potential harmful consequences. Throughout my ghostwriting experience and discussions in class about ghostwriting, I have swayed back and forth between whether or not I think it is an ethical practice. I truly believe that it depends on the situation. If I were to engage in ghostwriting in my future career, the person I was writing for would have to share similar values to my own. I would not be comfortable writing something that could influence others if it were against the beliefs I hold. Overall, I enjoyed this ghostwriting experience because I was able to learn more about a close friend through listening to her experiences and values in the nursing profession.