ENGL 420: Business Writing

This article was a good help for our project because two of our deliverables are a flyer and a brochure. One of the hardest parts of the flyer was keeping is simple and only including information that is important and relevant. Also, writing for someone other than myself (in our case the Banks of the Wabash organization) was extremely difficult because we had to use what they thought was important. This did help somewhat because we could tell them from the readers perspective on what in the flyer seemed like important information and what seemed to just be fillers.

One client that could possibly work for us is Wal-mart because we could find a way to work with them within the local community to propose how they can possibly help for those who have lost business. Another client could be a local store to work for a proposal to Wal-mart and possibly make a proposal for the same overall solution.

The Client Based Service Learning Project seems to be a good way to gain experience in the field of dealing with clients and topic proposals. Being able to write in context is a must for those who are dealing with people or corporations that are not similar to themselves. It will be difficult to organize with and persuade a company or group that we have no affiliation with because of the different backgrounds and systems each of us are accustomed to. Once we take care of the actual specifics of writing in the correct context the whole group writing process should fall together with ease.

Like the resume the white paper is immediately judged by its initial appearance. As a group we tried to put all of the charts and sections together before finishing the final layout that we could see what would work best with the work we had completed. While reading some of the other groups’ white papers and editing, I felt as though each group was on track with completing a successful white paper. One that stood out was the Recycling at Purdue white paper not because of the issues but while doing the peer editing exercise that particular group seemed to be right on track.

Today we had our last group meeting which mainly involved small details such as editing sentences and finishing the final formatting so the paper is visually attractive. Overall as a group I feel as though we worked well together. We met a total of 6 times which most meetings excluding the last one lasted about 2 hours. The main thing I realized once again is that similar to a resume the first overall glance of a white paper can determine whether someone considers it worthwhile to read. At times as a group we would get off task by talking about weekend events or just anything random.

From the reading “Group Work and Collaborative writing, the section that stood out to me was the “making your group a success.” I never really have thought about the idea that you are doing two things at once being able to talk about and solve a problem. So far I consider our group to be extremely productive in the sense that we can talk about issues without arguing and are able to put what each of us think down on paper without creating problems.

As a group I feel comfortable with the project. So far we have completed an extremely detailed outline that will significantly help us on our white paper. The only issue I see is making our paper too long because we had about 1300 words in our outline alone. But this will make it simple to write the paper because we did put a lot of figures in our outline that will be directly posted in the paper. We have met twice and have not had any issues because each person is pulling their fair share of work and we are really making headway on this assignment.

Not having a large amount of experience with memos, I realized that a memo is a whole lot more personal than I would have expected. For instance, before reading this article I thought a memo were things such as weekly updates for a company. But I now understand that a memo must have a direct problem with direct solutions that are meant to be personalized to the reader. From this article I see that a memo is somewhat of a briefing of a problem and how it is being attacked for a solution.

So far our group has only met once where we wrote the first group deliverable as a team. The first source I have is a power point from an associate professor at Ohio State which states several facts about Wal-mart’s size, growth, benefits, effects and many other specific topics. This is perfect for our project because it is a completely non-biased power point and gives the sources from which its information comes from. The second source is a pbs.org Nightly Business Report which focuses on the scrutiny of the cases imposed on Wal-mart.

I am looking forward to this project because it is something that really does not have many guidelines. Besides the main style of a white paper format, there is no limit for what we fill the space with. I read a few of the example white papers to get an idea of what one should look like. After reading the assignment details I was not surprised by the content or formatting. I do like how the writer does not necessarily pick one side over another. This makes it nice because the writer is not judged by the reader for his or her views.