English 420: Business Writing

As I mentioned in last week's blog, we met up and divided our duties as to who will write about which part. This week we all met up and patched up our separate parts into one single white paper. We again met this week to correct it as per the peer reviews and also gave it final touches. We also designed a rough draft of our presentation in prezi.com. It was a lot of learning but a lot of fun too!

This week, Boilers Gone Green met to get the rough draft of our white peper completed and to get a start with our visual presentation. We were all assigned parts for each of our solutions to research and write what Purdue should do. I was assigned the part about educating our students and faculty members. I began doing this research by looking at what the top “green” schools were doing and how Purdue can use their methods. We all then met again on Sunday and put together what everyone had found.

This week our group worked very hard to complete our rough draft of the White Paper. The group meet on a couple occasions in order to finish our goal. Together our group thought it was important to write the White Paper as a group rather than split sections individually. The purpose of this was to make our White Paper have consistent writing styles. However, we did assign sections of our paper individually to do research and made outlines of the sections. I was assigned to the previous approaches section regarding "the green roof" and the second proposal.

This week our group met worked on our assigned individual parts of the white paper project. I went and got research statistics to back up everything that we were talking about in the hand sanitizer portions of the paper. I went to Matthews and asked the first 150 whether they would use sanitizer or not if it was at the entrance of all the computer labs. We then met on Wednesday and put all of our individual parts together to form our completed white paper project. This is something that I learned in the reading we had to do for Thursday.

At the beginning of this week my group designated the specific areas of research to look into. On Tuesday night we had a meeting and collaborated all of the research we had put together individually. One of our team members had an interview with Citybus, which gave us a good foundation on which we started our white paper. Refering to the draft section in the article we were assigned to read online, they told us how we are supposed to designate different parts of our white paper to different people in our group.

Our group, The Tech Geeks, spent a lot of time this past week developing the rough draft for our white paper. We took the approach explained in Thursday’s readings and split the writing of the paper into individual work. We met on Sunday to discuss the tone we were going to take in our paper and divide the project into sections for each member to complete. On Tuesday, we got together and put all of our individually completed sections into one finished draft.

This week, my group worked very hard. We met Sunday and distributed the three solutions amoung our members. I wrote a paragraph for solution one. I also created a survey to get facts and statistics for the paper. We then met up on Tuesday and constructed our rough draft. I worked with Indesign and made the creative parts of the paper. I also typed all of our sections into the rough draft. While I was working with Indesign, Sam was editing our sections and checking for errors. Brandy helped me with ideas and helped me figure out how to do different things in the program.

This week our team met twice to conclude our research and draft our white paper. We met first to start drafting individual sections of the paper, then the second time we met we put the whole thing together. To tie this in with the pieces that we were to read, we met as a group, which was a part that we were to do together, then we drafted individual sections. This part was something the readings said that we were to do on our own at first. After we got those pieces together we began formatting our paper and making it visually appealing.

This past week we got together as a group and integrated all of our parts together to have a nice rough draft. We also spent time adding in graphs and pictures to make our proposal more appealing and effective. But after reading the two online articles I felt that we did some things that should have been as a team, individually, which could ultimately hurt us. As a team we worked together to create a purpose like the article suggests. We also worked together to draft a basic outline and divide the paper into sections with headings.

After completing our first draft of our white paper we read a few articles online about group project steps and the right way to go about drafting the project. One thing I learned was they recommended it is best to draft the project individually first. This is because team drafting can be slow and inefficient. It is always important to send revised sections to another person to make sure all mistakes are caught. The final step is sending the revised sections to a master file which is the whole report.