ENGL 420: Business Writing

I thought the reading on oral presentation tips had a lot of good information. One tip they talk about is having your slides very clear and concise. I know when I give a presentation I put too much stuff on a slide and the audience just reads it like a book instead of listening to what you are saying. I have learned that you need to put a little as possible so you don’t end up just reading it off to your audience. Some of the tips they give on delivery were very helpful. I liked the one on don’t stand behind something unless you have to.

The reading response this week is about plagiarism and the ethics behind it. It seems plagiarism is becoming a bigger problem than it used to be in the past. I am not sure if it’s because people are getting lazier or have bad time management and leave everything to the last minute. My opinion on plagiarism is people do it on accident. I am not talking about somebody just copying and pasting the exact same thing. When I say they do it on accident, I mean they read somebody’s work and reword it to make it sound different.

At the beginning of this project we were going to do Big Brothers Big Sisters or Habitat for Humanity. We were thinking about making a broacher for them so more people would know about it and could get involved. After discussing how it wasn’t going to work we came up with a new topic to do a flyer for Café Royale. It’s located on the corner of Northwestern and Stadium and have extended hours during finals week. After running it by out teacher to see if he approved we got straight to work.

I enjoyed the reading on 10 rules to effective language. I was thinking about being a marketing major and most of those rules were directed towards the marketing standpoint. A couple of the rules really stood out to me. I liked the rule that told you to keep your messages short and to the point, and they give Nike as an example. Nike’s main message is “Just Do It”, and even though it is such a short message it can apply to almost anything. Nike is all about sports and being the best.

One client I was thinking about for the third project would be the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. I think that would be a good client because I am sure not a lot of students know about it and I am sure some would like to get involved. I enjoy astronomy and I had no idea about the club until I did research. I would be the prime example of a student that would have joined the club if I knew it existed. The type of document we would make would be a broacher that explains everything about the club and put it in locations where people would notice it.

Well it’s nice to finally be done with the White Paper and move on to something different. Since there weren’t any readings for this week, I will talk about the next project coming up. This project I think will be interesting because we are dealing with real world companies. I always find it more beneficial to actually deal with the real world, since that is the reason we are in school. I don’t think it will be hard to find a non-profit company that will allow us to write a document for them. I think any company would be flattered to receive any kind of help.

Since there wasn’t any reading responses this week I will just talk about the peer reviews. I think the peer reviews help out a lot. Sometimes when you write something you think it reads a certain way, but it may be completely wrong. It’s very helpful to get other peoples opinions and their point of view. I am glad we are done with this project and can now relax and have a good time on spring break. It will be back to business after break and start working on the presentation.

The paper is finally complete. We meet Thursday afternoon as usually and put it all together. This afternoon I got everybody’s sources and made up the MLA citation page. Some people in the group changed the layout of their section and make it easier to read. We put a few more graphs in the paper and changed the layout. Before, the paper was just one big text instead of a white paper but after the changes it flows and looks a lot better. Overall, I think our group worked very well together and we came up with a pretty good final product.

The project went well this week. We were supposed to have a meeting on Thursday to put together the rough draft. But instead we decided that we would just send our portion of the project to the person that is putting it together instead. My portion of the project was to do the abstract and the introduction. We ended up have each person take 2 parts of the project which worked out pretty well. After we get feed back from the rough draft we will have to get together next week and finish the final draft.

I thought the reading about the First Meeting under the Group Work and Collaboration had a lot of good ideas. It talked about how your first meeting should be very long and you should schedule your next meeting and the responsibilities of each group member. In our first meeting, we didn’t do that and it affected our next meeting because we didn’t get much done in the first meeting. I think it is a great idea to get everything out of the way the first meeting or else everybody is wondering the whole time what they are suppose to be doing.