English 420: Business Writing

This week we continued to expand on the ideas in our revised proposal, with each of us taking a specific section to research. We will be meeting to discuss which areas need improvement and to see if anyone needs help. My section includes reasons why PUSH hours are a problem, so I will be helping to interview and survey students/faculty about their opinions on the topic. We will start recording our findings in the near future.

This week was a short week so not much happened within the group. The biggest issue of our proposal that was discussed last week was the length. Our proposal ended up being 3 pages total when proposals are usually one to two pages. I offered to shorten the proposal before break since I knew we would all be taking advantage of our break and not want to worry about something like that. Plus, I was the only one available to do that afterwards (everybody else had something going on). I had the time and was more than willing to fix the length of the proposal.

Since it was October break last week, communication within our group was pretty much on hold. I think we pretty much all just took time off from school and took advantage of our break. Sara had graciously edited our proposal to fit the length requirement before break and sent the revised version to all of us before she had sent it to you; it looked perfect. There was also some talk about meeting on Wednesday when we were all back from break so we could discuss any of the revisions that were made for the whole proposal and adjust the proposal accordingly.

This week didn't go quite as planned. Our group decided we would just make revisions on the proposal though email since of the short week. When Wednesday rolled around it was still incomplete, so I decided I would make the revisions. I mailed out the completed proposal to our group members and told them to make any necessary revisions they'd like and mail it back to me. When i received the revisions I submitted it.

For this week, our team met on Wednesday to make the necessary revisions to our proposal. For the proposal, I included an approximate cost for the construction of a pedestrian bridge. Also, I made an attempt to create a logo for our team (“Purdue Pedestrian Initiative”). Mr. Baker had expressed his concern on our third solution so we decided to implement a new solution – identifying a new CityBus route or changing existing ones to meet the emerging demands. This solution would replace the previous one, which was the re-routing of S.R. 26/ East State Street traffic.

After our proposal pitch, our group decided to change our third solution to increasing surveillance around campus, especially at locations where crimes have been committed most recently. This solution is far more feasible than our original idea to have undercover police officers in the bar. The necessary revisions to our proposal were made. After looking over the comments on our final draft of the proposal further revisions were made and communicated to all group members via email.

Over this past week, my group had the opportunity to revise and improve our memorandum. We collaborated our ideas and ended up correcting some minor details with the titles and group name as well as specifying our solutions a bit further. We analyzed the costs associated with each solution and stated them in an order which shows the most relevant to least relevant. We described the solutions in ways that would directly effect the student body as well as the entire Purdue community.

This week our group wasn’t able to meet due to Fall Break. After our proposal meeting on Thursday with Mr. Baker, we decided that all the revisions could be done without us meeting. During our proposal meeting Mr. Baker’s main criticism was the length of our proposal. Proposals are characteristically only one to two pages while ours was a full three pages. Right after the meeting at 9:30 Sara volunteered to make the length of the proposal shorter.

Mr. Baker

Her is my week 2 Progress Report.

Thank You,

Jessica Baker

After the proposal meeting our group meet up to talk about another solution to campus safety because our third option wasn’t very valid. So we came up with lighting and surveillance as our third solution. We made the quick changes to our proposal document and submitted on the ENG 420 website. Because of Fall Break and the short week we decided to meet this Sunday and Monday to work on preparing our White Paper Project. We split up the basic research ideas and I decided to research defense classes at the Co-Rec.