ENGL 420: Business Writing

After numerous presentations that I have given in my life, I still get nervous. The way PWOnline explained nervousness is the exact way to do it. KNOWING THE MATERIALS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING! I have given presentations when I didn't know the material as well as I should have and I crash and burned.

One thing I try not to do during a presentation is look at the screen behind me. Your audience can't hear you and it looks terrible. It looks like you don't know the material.

After reading the Gender in the Workplace in PWOnline I feel like everything is true. The reason why I think it is true is because I am in the construction field. In my senior class there are 5 femalescompared to 55 males. It just feels like most of the femalestry to fit in with the males, but it is hard to crack the personalities of the males. I see even bigger discrimination in the construction field on site. Most of the construction workers are males and I know for a fact that most if not all males don't like having females on the jobsite.

One of my favorite things to do is watch YouTube videos. When I saw watch a YouTube video as an assignment I couldn't wait. Then I realized what the video was trying to teach me. Because of my background in BCM, we have to work with schedules a lot during our classes. I have used a program that does what Excel was doing. It is called Project Primavera Planner. It does exactly what the Excel Gantt chart does, but more. You can level resources and and more on this program. It is a very powerful program that almost might be too powerful for what we need.

When reading the types and contexts of proposals I really found it interesting to see that informal proposals written like that. It seemed like an instant message. If it is that informal the it doesn't even seem necessary to ask permission.

The first idea I had for the client based project is the Habitat for Humanity. During my 4 years at Purdue the Habitat for Humanity has been thrown around the Building Construction Management Department, but I have never participated in it. I think the word isn't spread wide enough. I am sure there are many people in the University that would like to get involved, but the word just needs to get out more.

After reading the criteria for the third and final project I was surprised that there were so many different things we could do for the client. I orginally thought that a web site was a requirement, but I saw that we can do a flyer or a press release it really opens up the ideas that we can do. I hope to do something like the white paper that has a lot of design. I am also looking forward to working with the same group from project 2.

Our group met on Wednesday this week to finalize our white paper. I think we changed a lot of formatting issuses with our paper. I remember playing witht eh font a lot and margin quotes. We also changed the color of the paper. I think we made the right changes to make our paper professional. The most important part of this whole process was that we had a very detailed outline so writing the paper was a snap. Designing the paper was a little harder, but when we worked as a team I think we came up with something that we all agree on.

The only reading I did this week was of other group's papers. I think I learned a lot from their topics and it is really interesting to see how they present their problem and solutions to the class. When I was reviewing the papers I took a lot of ideas from other people's format and applied it to our white paper. The best formatted paper I saw was the Animal Shelter. It looked very professional and had a lot of great information. Looking foward to the next project.

There weren't many readings this week. I read the group work and collaborative writing web site and I agreed with most of the things on there. The one thing I enjoyed reading though were the other white paper projects that we reviewed in class this week. When we typed our rough draft we used those examples as ideas for our white paper. Group 8 plans on taking everything good from each of the white papers to hopefully make the perfect example to show in class next semester.

We finished our rough draft for the white paper. Last week when we met and did our detailed outline we practically wrote the paper in sentence fragments. Because we did such a detailed outline we could concentrate more or design ideas because we didn't have to look up information, that was done already. I have been most active in solution 2 of our white paper, unionizing Wal-Mart employees. Everyone has taken a role on the team and we have worked well together. When we were typing the paper we would reword each others thoughts to make the sentence flow.