Bonita Ewan 1994 Hi. I'm Bonita Ewan. I grew up in Maryland. I am the fourth generation of Deaf people in my family. I went to a Deaf school in Maryland and I graduated from Gallaudet in Communications. I work at Salk Institute as well. I work with ASL research. When I first heard about Sign Writing, I strongly disagreed. I thought it was totally unnecessary. I wanted to meet Valerie Sutton, because I was curious. So I met her and she asked me if I was interested in working with SignWriting and I thought "Sure. Why not?" I felt a little bit like a hypocrite, but I wanted to see if it was interesting and sure enough...I became fascinated with SignWriting. I had never really thought about it, but it is a wonderful opportunity for Deaf people to be able to understand and to preserve ASL and ASL stories. You know, some hearing teachers are not good at presenting ASL stories but this would be a marvelous tool for them to use. In the future, I wish we could add facial expressions because that's my love and I believe that Deaf schools could use that. It would also be good for mainstreaming programs and for use with ASL storytelling. So I hope that is what it is used for in the upcoming future.

The above was signed in ASL by Bonita Ewan in 1994 on the video entitled Deaf Perspectives on SignWriting. The English text is a word-for-word transcription of the English voice-over on the video, by interpreter Melissa Smith.