ENGL 420: Business Writing

This week we read over some articles on plagiarism. Clearly plagiarism is a very serious thing that needs to be addressed. Honestly I didn't know who the "established" people that we talked about, but I think it is pretty pathetic for someone who is out there writing books to even think of plagiarizing. Even if someone is writing a college term paper, they should never be just copying and pasting information. I really think there is a such thing as accidental plagiarism, but if you are copying and pasting and not quoting, that is blatant plagiarism.

This week we read about Gantt Charts and went through Luntz rules for writing. I specifically found Luntz' rules for writing to be especially interesting. Each of the ten rules had their value and you can really learn to capture your audience if you use the rules effectively. I liked the rule about sound and texture of words. It said that you should write in a way so that your words sound alike and are easy on the reader. If the reader can get into any sort of a rhythm they will enjoy reading it much more.

At this point in time our project is clearly in the very early stages of development. All we have done so far is turn in our three topic suggestions and have gotten the go ahead on two of them. Next week I'm sure we will begin to make contact with the Habitat for Humanity, and if they don't work out we can fall back on the Big Brother's and Sister's program. This week our group only met in class, and sent eachother's topic suggestions to me by Tuesday night so that I could put together the memo for wednesday.

This week our readings were about proposals. Proposals are documents that you send to someone, probably an organization, that detail a problem that they have and your solution to that problem. The proposal has to inform the organization of who you are, what their problem is, how you are going to fix it, and how much it would cost to finish. Your proposal has to be very specific otherswise they company probably won't take you seriously. The example proposal that we had in class was about 5 pages long, and that is probably a fairly short proposal.

One potential client that I have is to hook up with someone that is running for the student body government and do some marketing for their campaign. We would be able to work with them and make fliers, brochures, and do other things to promote their campaign. This would work out well for them because we would be providing a free service and putting in time for them that they wouldn't have to. Another potential client that I have is to team up with the ZLB plasma center down in the levee.

This week the only reading that we had was to read up about the service learning project. After going through the project guidelines, I think this project has some benefits and and some unnecessary elements. Relationships that you build in your career are a huge part of being successful. The building relations and communication part of this project seems to me to be the strong points of this project, but the rest doesn't quite hit home with me.

This week we wrapped up our white paper. I think that the final draft is very good. Our group got together today and put the final touches to it and put it all together. I think our paper does a good job of addressing the issues on our topic, and doing it in a manner that is expected from a white paper. In the end, our group did a good job of maintaining a good relationship and communication. We may have been a little bit behind some groups at certain stages along the way but all that matters is the finished product, and we turned out a good one in my opinion.

This week we didn't have any readings to do online, but we did a lot of reading in class. Everyday we read and went over everyones white papers. There are some very good topics and a lot of information to be learned from everyone. I found the white paper on animal control quite interesting. I was unaware that there was such a big problem of animal over population. I thought that their ideas for maintaining and handling the problem were very well thought out too.

This week we didn't have a whole lot of assigned reading. There were two powerpoints on presentation that were kind of informative but seemed quite a bit like review and fundamental. Since we didn't have a lot of readings, I will say a little bit about what we did in wednesday's class. I found the presentation at Hicks to be very informative. I have never used either of the programs they talked about so it was very nice to get even a basic run through of the programs. I think the presenter could have been a little better but I can't really complain.

This week was a pretty good week for our group. We each did our individual assigned parts and sent them in to Preston who is putting them all together to turn in tomorrow. We have continued to have good group communication through email. My part of the project went well this week. I was able to find some good website with information on part of the paper. My portion of the paper is to cover locking down the whole border. I could not find exact cost estimates but ballparked it and I feel that my portion was quite well rounded.