ENGL 420: Business Writing

We are concluding our project, we have gotten to the point where our group needs to do is hear from the peer reviews. We emailed our client yesterday and had him look at the rough draft of our brochure. He had a few complaints and opinions, luckily they were only minor things that will not take too much time or energy to alter. Now, the only thing we need to do is organize a presentation in order to professionally explain and hand over our brochure. We believe this presentation will be fairly informal, our group has reached a comfort level with our client.

I just completed reading the section on informal oral presentations that pertained to audience/speaker distance. As I read the section and reflect on it, I realize that this situation happens all the time. Every time someone begins a conversation with someone else, the two parties have to agree on an appropriate distance. Many of these decisions have become second nature, but these inherent decisions are definitely there, these decisions are unnoticed because they can be instantaneous.

I enjoyed and believe the article, “Ten Rules of Effective Communication,” is a very useful and relevant article for this class. This article defined concrete rules of communication that I believe can be applied in all areas. On the other hand are the articles that were scheduled for Friday. I had a tough time believing many of the statements in the readings within the Social and Cultural Issues chapter of “Professional Writing.”

The most important aspect of a proposal is to call the attention of the reader to the problem. I believe this is the most important because it is the most difficult idea to communicate to the reader. In my own experiences, I have been very defensive and unwilling to listen to others’ opinion and theories as soon as they tell me that my way of doing things is wrong. I have also been on the other side of the spectrum. Take for instance the white paper project, I was having a very hard time convincing other groups that their designs and context could be edited and improved.

I am not really sure what to wire this week because there were no articles to read. The only material assigned this week was information regarding the third project. So I suppose I will just talk about that…

Client 1 – Purdue University Refuse/Recycling Department (Department of Grounds)

Like everyone else has mentioned, there was not too much reading to be completed this week other than the peer reviews and the editing of our own project documents. The peer reviews consumed most of the time and effort of the two reading duties. The peer reviews can be split in to two categories, reading other white papers and reading what others have stated about my groups paper. Both of these aspects of the peer review were beneficial and nerve racking. When I read other groups white papers, I was determined to help them by noting what I believed to be hard to understand or unnecessary.

Fortunately our group assembled so many times throughout the past couple weeks. This allowed us to complete our project on Wednesday and at the same time, acknowledge the advice and recommendations that were provided by our fellow students. As I look back at this experience and group I was a part of, I realize that we were a very responsible and efficient group. From the very beginning, our group met at least once a week. Starting this habit at the very beginning of the project made it easy to work on the project.

Our group definitely is having some troubles with incorporating design elements and text on one document. The combination of Microsoft Word’s new software and an extremely poor presentation on Microsoft Publisher and Adobe Photoshop has made it difficult for our group to insert design elements like pictures, graphs, quotes, et cetera. However we did pull together a decent rough draft after a long evening at Hick’s undergraduate library. Our group did a very good job on distributing work among members. We also did an excellent job coming together to consolidate our work on to one draft.

There were only a few readings and articles to look at this week if you include the power points on presentations. These presentations were a nice refresher of a class that I took while in high school. However I think they are unnecessary. Everyone that had the opportunity to read these already knew this information. All these tips are doing is making a student’s work habits and thought process more automated. These presentations are trying to teach the reader exactly how to be organized and presentable, but can these skills be taught with slides and bullet points?