English 420: Business Writing

This week was the final and most crucial week for this project. This resulted in our group meeting multiple times as well as working individually outside of class and group meetings. Our group had concluded most of our research prior to this week, so as far as research goes, we did a very minimal amount. The majority of our time this week was spent putting together both our white paper and the presentation for class. This is where the research came in. First was the white paper.

Working with others is something we will all be doing in our professional and educational lives, so being able to work in a group is a skill that is important to have. But sometimes working in groups can be somewhat difficult to do. Team members may have drastically different schedules or some members might not pull their own weight. For our white paper project I felt like our group worked really well together. We came up with our problem and solution together and divided up the work evenly.

This week our group was very productive in terms of completing our White Paper Project. We met three times outside of class to finalize our paper and create our presentation. We first met on Sunday to revise our White Paper. Chris and I went line by line through the paper to make sure there were no typos. We also worked on getting the style of each section consistent with the rest of the paper. Since we had written the sections individually, it took a lot of collaboration to make the paper fit together seamlessly.

During the last week of the white paper project, my group and I finally put all the work and research we had done into an oral presentation. We met on Monday to read over and correct any revisions that our peers had pointed out to us during the peer review session that we had in class last week. The Monday meeting our group had was relatively short, and concluded with everyone in our group being assigned a section of the presentation on which we each would speak on.

This week including the weekend we meat three times before our final presentation. On Sunday we met in Krannert to finish revising our final paper and put together our presentation on prezi. We finished that and decided to meet again on Tuesday where we started to put our ideas together in how we were going to present it. Then on Wednesday we met one final time to run through our presentation and made sure we had everything just the way we wanted it.

This week was the big week. All what we worked on in the earlier weeks had to be put together in the final paper and as a presentation. We all met on Tuesday with 2 of us working on the final draft of the paper while the other 2 designed the presentation. After completing the presentation we practiced the it. We met up again on Wednesday when we again practiced and decided what we are going to wear on Thursday for our presentation. On Thursday, things went pretty well. I was impressed the amount of work people had put in their presentations.

Over the past week, Kelly, Tyler and I made corrections to our final white paper. We did so by first reading over the peer editing, followed by correcting a formatting/text error, creating a more in depth description of a passage, and correcting some small text errors. We also began brainstorming ideas of how to make an effective presentation without utilizing PowerPoint. The three of us experimented with Prezi and some other platforms that Gerrit had found and emailed to me.

This was our final week of the White Paper project. The last remaining thing was to present our White Paper to the class. In class on Tuesday we finished putting our last touches on the presentation. Prior to our meetings this week, I did some research for alternative ways to present our white paper instead of using PowerPoint. Our group worked with idea of using Prezi but we had a couple of concerns. First, I figured the rest of the groups would be using Prezi, so we wanted to be different. Secondly, I was concerned that Prezi uses too much "animations" going from one topic to the next.

This week our group met twice to finalize our white paper and to create our Prezi presentation. Each member of our group read through the white paper multiple times in order to catch spelling errors or to make any awkward sentences flow smoother. We also printed a few different test copies of the paper to make sure all of the formatting looked good in print (as opposed to on the computer screen). Kyle and I spent a good amount of time creating and formatting our Prezi presentation and trying to reduce pixelation in the different images.

The final presentation for our white paper project had finally come this week. On Sunday, our group had met to discuss which type of visual we should use in our presentation. We all felt nobody in our group had enough practice or experience to use Prezi and decided to use SlideRocket instead. Jennifer came up with a great idea of having a tree slowly grow more leaves as each slide was introduced. This would symbolize Purdue as “growing greener.” We all decided to split up the speaking so as to have the presentation flow better.