ENGL 420: Business Writing

The only readings this week were the oral presentation review document checklist, and the collaboration evaluation and project assessment. The oral presentation checklist gave an overview on what we should cover in order to deliver an “A” presentation. The individual deliverables, the collaboration evaluation and the project assessment are due on Wednesday and are the same as the ones for the White Paper, we have to evaluate our group members on their contributions, our own contributions, and the project we completed itself.

For this week’s readings we focused on oral presentations because they are an important part of the business world as most meetings and major decisions are made face to face. It is important to be effective in communicating ideas in order to get your point across. There are a few key points to consider when organizing an oral presentation is the audience being presented to, is it a formal or informal meeting?

The readings this week, from PWOnline, were about plagiarism and the legal issues surrounding using others work, gender issues in the workplace, and an ethical editing checklist. The first reading regarding plagiarism states that we have a moral obligation, if we use others’ writings or ideas to give them the proper acknowledgement. The two categories of copyright relating to writers is copyright, which deals with all text, pictures, movies, etc. A copyright is, “the exact expression of an idea…not the idea itself” (PWOnline).

The readings for this week on proposals was pretty much the same information as last week, but the examples helped clarify exactly what the documents were trying to convey. As for the Gantt Chart reading and video, it explained in a very easily that a Gantt chart is a schedule that helps us plan the tasks for our project and keep track of our progress. It also helps to let our client know of the timetable for the project.

Natasha, Elisa, Tara, Tim

For this week’s readings Proposals, in PWOnline, the sample proposal and the Proposal PowerPoint explained how we are to write our proposal do our potential client (and professor). One of the interesting facts I picked up while reading Proposals, is that our proposal needs to be geared toward an “interested but skeptical reader”. Our proposal needs to be persuasive and informative, showing that we understand the problem, we have a plan to solve it, we have the skills needed to implement it and that it will be worthwhile.

For our third project, we are to locate a potential client that we would be able to produce some sort of professional writing for them. I think that one possibility is the Almost Home Humane Society, which we covered for our White Paper. I think that the research we did during our White Paper gave us a perfect start to approach Almost Home and try to resolve their closed-door policy regarding owner-surrendered animals. We’ve already done the research and have a complete background of what they are all about, the problems they are facing and possible solutions.

With the White Paper project being completed, we are moving on toward the last project, the client based service-learning project. Both of the readings this week deal with our final project. For the final project, we are to form a group, research a potential client and meet them to figure out a business-writing project that would benefit them. We are to use everything we learned from the previous two projects and create a professional writing piece for a real world problem. The project follows the same guidelines as project 2 did.

This week we turned in our white paper. We had a little bit of difficultly due to myself being away and I'm in charge of putting everything together. We didn't need to meet this week because we had everything finished except for grammar and minor fixes. All of these small fixes were able to be done electronically. I have gathered all the charts, figures and graphs together for our powerpoint, which we will be working on during break, since we present on the Monday we get back.

There wasn't much reading to do this week, we mostly did peer reviews for our white paper project. I thought the peer review process was extremely helpful. It was good to see how other people interpreted the same white paper and what changes we should make. I did think that the review sheet was a bit long and next time I think I will focus on the actual white paper when making changes instead of trying to finish the peer review sheet.