ENGL 420: Business Writing

The majority of this weeks readings have been tailored for the oral presentation. An oral presentation can come in many forms, and can use many to very few props. Oral presentations can be about anything, Progress Reports, proposals, sales presentations, and many more. It is important that with all oral presentations, that the written information and materials support what is being verbalized. The first point of any presentation is to know who your audience is and tailor the presentation to them. It would be ineffective to try to sell light bulbs to a strictly amish audience.

Our work with Cafe Royal is progressing along at a fine rate. This past week has been productive with the production of a proposal and a meeting with the client. The proposal was created and submitted for review on Monday. After review the proposal was given back and turned out to be missing some key information, such as contact information and a few design details. The revisions were made, and the proposal was approved on Wednesday. Later that day was the meeting with the client to present the proposal and work out a few more details.

This past week has been primarily a study in proposal writing. We have read many examples of proposals that have been from very short, to extremely long. There are also numerous types of proposals, from internal to external, and the solicited or unsolicited proposals. All of the proposals need to be written differently and with a different tone. Some require that the proposal suggest a job that needs accomplished, while others are proposals for continuance of a project, or to give a bid to do a job. Each of these proposals have similar aspects included in each.

I read all about the project three.

My two clients would be habitat for Humanity or College Mentors for Kids.

I thought I had just slacked off this week and not done any assigned readings. Well I was wrong; I was on top of things and didn't miss any assigned readings. There were none. We had to read White Papers all week, and not just scan them. WE were expected to really look at these papers for a good twenty minutes and give a good solid critique. If the other people in class share my mentality that the best work is done within 24 hours of a due date, then all the critiques and suggestions fell on deaf ears.

The white paper is now complete. This week was a little hectic getting everything together and finalizing the whole project. Everyone completed their sections of the paper. We met on Thursday to make everything look similar and agree on the final layout. We added a decent number of graphs, all of which are self explaining, and we decided which bits of text needed to be emphasized. I am glad this project is over. I enjoyed designing the paper and laying everything out, but getting the information together was not an enjoyable experience.

Working on Project. Made Rough Draft.

This week was a fantastic week for me. Finally we were not bombarded with multiple reading assignments concerning roughly the same topic. The few readings we did have were very relevant to this stage of the White Paper project. There were two power points that dealt with presentations. The one about bad examples I found easier to read and more appealing. It gave many examples of the wrong and the right way to present information. A lot of the information seemed like common sense, but it was interesting to see how presentations can be taken to the extreme wrong extreme.

The Reading for this week has basically just been looking at other White Papers. I have enjoyed it, because I typically do not think of problems that need fixing. It is interesting to hear what problems there are and how people propose to fix them. In class on Wednesday my reading was to look at the drug testing white paper and evaluate the design elements. My first reaction was too how plain it was. It was a neat and clean looking paper, with the exception of the title text.