English 420: Business Writing

During the two day week before Thanksgiving our group did very little. Since Sara and Ashley left to go home early, Sandeep and I went to visit Natalie. We asked her different questions about what she wanted on the brochure. She gave us some suggestions and outlined a few key things she wanted. We took some notes on that so we were ready to create the brochure after Thanksgiving. We also had her sign the contract.

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.

During this week, our group worked on making final revisions to our proposal before our meeting on Thursday. We fixed the grammatical errors, and added an extra paragraph about the video interview we would be doing within the next couple weeks. We also read through, discussed, and signed our work contract that would be given to Don McClean to be signed by Tuesday. During our meeting on Thursday, we discuessed our proposal and our specific ideas for our public documents.

Over the past week my group and I gathered a lot of information regarding our clients wants and needs for this opportunity. We drafted all of our ideas and then put them into writing by signing a working contract. Additionally we edited our rough draft and came up with the final draft of our proposal. With knowing exactly what our client desires for this project, we were able to set deadlines and due dates for all of our materials. Most of the advertisements mentioned in our contract are to be due during dead week.

The main responsibilites that I took within my group this week was to help revise our proposal. Many of the other groups reviewed our paper and found many things that needed to be changed. Lots of the changes were grammatical, but there were also structural changes that needed to be made as well.
We also included a paragraph about our video project that we were going to do with our client.
The interview with Mr. Baker was fairly laid back and the group simply talked through the proposal with him.

TUESDAY: Since we did not have class on Tuesday, the group decided to meet in class to make the final changes to the formal proposal. Given the time-conflicting, as well as, busy schedules at this time of the semester, we felt it was best to met in class since we had the day off. The final changes made were - changing the time line to a list instead of a paragraph, changing the header to only one main heading on the main page and proofread the document. Since we still had time, we decided to use the opportunity to work on the contract due on Thursday.

This week we put together our contract. We met in the normal time of class on Tuesday in place of working out our schedules and finding a meeting time. Since I have some experience with contracts, I tried to help as much as I could. At Gold and Black Illustrated I work with advertising contracts quite often, so I was already familiar with the general language and format of a contract. We mainly used the sample contract as a template to our contract. I helped mainly in developing the format of the signature area of the contract. After our meeting with Mr.

This week we planned really well with getting our work done ahead of time. On Tuesday we didn’t have class but our group took advantage of that day and met anyway to get the contract done early. In the beginning we were not really sure on how to start it but I think we had a really good draft started. I had typed the contract while the other group members were giving ideas and looking at sample online. We had not realized till our conference with Mr. Baker that there was another format we were to follow but editing that part is not that bad.

This week we did not have class on Tuesday our team met to draft the contract. Since I couldn't attend to this meeting I told the group that I will have an initial draft of the public document ready before they come back from thanksgiving, and we will all revise it and change it after the holiday.

Over the past week, our group made constant efforts to meet with our client, Brenda Lorenz, to interview her. We finally will make this possible by interviewing her today at 4pm. Brenda has been very flexible with us because we met on Wednesday to interview her and I picked up the video camera and everything was planned out but we mistakenly bought a mini dvd disc instead of a tape to insert in the camera. We also met before the final proposal presentation to cover the topics that we would be presenting to Mr. Baker on Thursday morning.