ENGL 420: Business Writing

We read about flyers and brochures. THis helped our group because we are making a flyer for our project. We read through it and made sure that the flyer was not too busy or too wordy. Also we tried to make it eye catching for our client. The other readings we had dealt with presentations. Parts of this reading did not pertain to this presentation we are giving because we are not supposed to have a powerpoint as our visual aid. For our project we have decided to use our flyer as our visual aid and then have it on the screen behind us as we talk so we can point things out.

This week as a group we met on Monday to discuss what we needed to put in the flyer and how it should look. We worked on it for about an hour and Ryan took the flyer home and revised it. Christa, Ryan and I attended the meeting. We also wrote out a list of questions for the peer reviews tomorrow morning. Christa worked on the outline of our presentation for next Monday and we will schedule a time as a group to present it. We are happy with our flyer and how professional it looks. We believe the client will be happy with our final project.

This week in the readings, we read about plagiarism, ethics and the role of gender in writing. The readings about plagiarism are the same as we have been told since we started writing. The part I find hardest about avoiding plagiarism is when citing is necessary compared to common knowledge. Some people have more extensive knowledge than others do. There is a fuzzy line between what has been researched and what a person knows. The easy part is if you take information from a paper, you need to cite it no matter how you reword the information.

This weeks readings were about writing a Gantt chart and the ethics of professional writing. In order to write the Gantt chart we need to know what we are writing and what the deadlines are. The writing about the ethics of writing was helpful because it reminded us that we needed to be helpful and not annoying the clients. The five simple steps to success was a little cheesy but it got the message across.

This week in the readings we learned about how to write our proposal for our service-learning project. There are a few different kinds of proposals that businesses can write. Our proposal is going to be one convincing the organization we want to help that we will actually benefit their organization. All proposals are persuasive in tone because you either want the organization to pick your project or you want the organization to give you business. As for the content of the proposal there will be to major sections with a lot of subsections.

This week we decided to keep the same group as our white paper group. Ryan, Sarah, and Christa met Monday at 11:30 am to write the memo for our proposed projects. We picked three organizations: LUM, Habitat for Humanity Purdue Chapter and a Community Center. Each organization helps families in need around the Lafayette area. We are anxiously awaiting to hear which project we get to start next week.

In this week’s reading we learned about the new project and potential clients, we can pick. The project sounds interesting although it will be very important to pick a client that is willing to work with the group. It might be hard to work around a business’s hours and our group’s busy schedule. Our group may continue with the overpopulation problem of pets but I think we might change our topic and possibly our group. I think the project will go smoothly once our group picks a topic and a client.

For this project, I think that Lafayette Urban Mission would be a great client to work with. This group is a non-profit organization that is always looking for help from volunteers. We could potentially make a brochure for them or help with a fundraising event. Another good client would be the Lafayette Crisis Center. This is human service organization providing free and confidential crisis intervention, information and referrals, and suicide prevention services 24 hours a day by trained volunteers.

This week was the last week of our white paper assignment. We did not meet as a group this week due to our busy schedules. For Monday Ryan printed out two copies of our white paper. We worked as a group to evaluate the two we recieved. I took home the one we did not get to work on in class and Ryan finished the other paper at home. On wednesday we split the notes up and worked on them seperately at home. I made a few revisions to the executive summary and introduction.

This week we read each others white papers. This was helpful because we got to see what other people wrote and how they compare to our papers. For the most part all of our papers had the same basic format. There were some differences of opinion about how the executive summary and the introductions should be written. These were later cleared up when we used the peer review sheet to review each others white papers.