English 420: Business Writing

This last week our group had one main goal. We had planned to meet with our client to go over the proposal we had come up with the week before. Finding a time to meet with the client was difficult to work out because of the holiday and us only having two days that were available for our client. Once we finally got ahold of him we found that he had gotten sick and had gone home early for the holiday but he said that we could work with the General Manager of University Spirit. When we went in to talk to the client we read over the contract with him and had him agree to the terms.

This past week my group met twice to figure out our final details for our white paper project and our presentation. We took into consideration all of the comments and suggestions that the other groups gave to us through the peer evaluations. I believe that this was a huge help because it showed us that our first draft of the white paper was very unprofessional and was not up to par with the other group's work. This came as a sort of a shock to us at the time, but with some time and hard work we finished up a polished and new white paper for our final draft.

Our group started the week off on Sunday with a group meeting to begin composing our draft. We had previously each done some research on separate aspects of each of our solutions. Most of the meeting was spent determining the organization of our white paper and developing an online survey to collect additional research from our peers. The survey would measure our fellow students’ feelings regarding the issues of safety on campus and their thoughts on how our solutions could improve their sense of security.

This week we did the most amount of work on our white paper. Our rough draft was due so we had to make sure that all of our paper was in order.

This week was very productive for our group. We scheduled a meeting on Tuesday to get better aquainted with InDesign. Although I couldn't make it due to my work schedule, we kept in touch through email about parts of the white paper to be done by our next meeting. On Wednesday we met again to start putting together our different parts of the rough draft. Each person researched a certain proposal, then we sent it to the other group members to read over before compiling it together.

This past week our group has worked exceptionally well together. We knew that making the draft for our final white paper would be very time consuming. Our week started off with a meeting at the Krannert Drawing Room on Monday afternoon to discuss the tasks that needed to be done. We kept the sections split up because we were already familiar with the topics we originally had. After the meeting, we all went our separate ways and did research on our assigned topics.

This week our group met twice to finish our rough draft of our white paper. With everyone's busy schedule it is hard to get all four of us all together at one time. On Tuesday we set up an Outline and familiarized ourselves with InDesign. On Wednesday we finished our white paper. When we got together we delegated different parts to each individual. This worked a lot better than trying to write up a section with multiple people. When we finished we got back together and imported the information into Indesign. This was probably the best our group worked together so far.

Over the last week our group, Intramurals with Incentive, has developed a stronger idea for how we wanted to compose our white paper. Since the first draft was due on Thursday, we decided to go out and do research and surveys to help prove our thesis that Intramural Sports at Purdue are neglected and need to fixed with increased incentives. I specifically talked to friends and random students around campus and surveyed them based upon their experiences and thoughts about the Co-Rec and the Intramural facilities.

Our group was extremely busy this week. We met multiple times to coordinate our research and writing. Jessica and I wrote questions for a survey and Sandeep put them into an online format. We decided to divide the writing of our paper by the subject, and each member chose a section in which he or she was most interested. Sandeep choose to work on underpasses and focused on the University of Boulder’s underpasses as his example. Jessica headed up the City Bus re-routing section and evaluated the current bus routes. I decided to research underground parking.

For this week, our team had met to collaborate on the individual drafts that we had on the different proposed solutions. Alex, Jessica and I had planned to research on the underground parking facilities, new City Bus routes and pedestrian underpasses respectively.