ENGL 420: Business Writing

All systems go!

The “5 Steps to Project Success: Seriously” was ridiculous. Although the silliness was unquestionably over the top with the different masks, a couple of his ideas seemed worthy of note. I liked his point of view, “Plan the work, and work the plan.” This is an excellent definition of project management, and one that I think is often not followed. I am excited about putting this plan into action as we are learning to complete Gantt charts this week, also.

The reading for this week was focused around becoming prepared to write our formal proposals for our client-based project. There was a student example proposal, which was good to see, and then a powerpoint presentation based on understand the Rhetoric of Proposal.

The reading this week was all in preparation for our final group project, which involves creating written materials in a client-based fashion. The guidelines seem to be very demanding and yet, at this time they are still very open-ended. I am ready to get further along in the client selection process so we can further develop our ideas and plan, so we have more well-defined goals which we can work toward accomplishing.

Potential Clients for the Client-Based Project:

Finished! Though I am currently in Michigan at the American College Dance Festival, I’ve been communicating with my group via email – and our paper is finished and it looks great!

This week has been very very busy, which has made finding time to get together and complete our project difficult. We knew this would happen and planned ahead accordingly, so getting our individual writing sections compiled and the document designed as a whole went relatively smoothly. I was unable to meet with Kevin and David Thursday evening until very late because of a speaking engagement. It turned out that they met and got a portion of the work done, and then I told them to go home and go bed and assured them that I would finish it and bring it to class.

This week’s reading was mainly examples of White Papers. As helpful as that has been, they are less than exhilarating. The reading on group work and collaborative writing was what stuck out to me the most, so I will share a couple points I found particularly interesting.

Our group met this week to get the ball rolling a little more with our white paper. Because I am the one in our group most familiar with the topic and the auction industry in general, we spent some time at our group meeting having a conference call with one of our sources, a customer of Adesa Indy. I thought it was important for David and Kevin to hear someone else, who is more knowledgeable talk a little about the project, and we all had the opportunity to ask any questions to help clarify our understanding and direction.

The three main sources I’ve found for researching the topic for our paper are people to interview. I have established contact with each of them, but we are in the process of finding a good time for telephone interviews with each of them. Because of this, I can’t summarize the information they haven’t given me, and rather I will tell you the type information I expect to gather from them.

Susie Grey, the Commercial Account Manager for ADESA Corporate