ENGL 420: Business Writing

Last reading response!

For this week's reading, there was a powerpoint presentation on how to make brochures. This was particularly helpful since my group and I are making a brochure for our client. The list of 'do's' was as good reference, and I think we followed the majority of them. A few of the rules are always caption photographs and use photographs instead of clipart. Another rule was to use only a single photograph on the front. One rule says to not be afraid of a lot of text. That if someone has asked for the brochure, they are interested in reading it. I think our situation is a little different.

All the readings for this week were in PWOnline. The first article I read was about plagiarism and copyright laws. Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else’s work as your own. Here at Purdue, this is a big part of what they call academic dishonesty, and it will get you a visit with the Dean of Students. Case Western Reserve has a similar view of academic dishonesty, as I am sure every school does. It is ok to use another person’s information in your own project, but it is important to give credit where credit is due. Copyright is used with texts and protects the authors work.

On Monday, we made our first contact with our number one choice for a client. This person is Joel Zarate, the recycling coordinator here at Purdue. He replied to our email extremely fast, and we set up a meeting with him for Wednesday, April 2 at 12:30 at Starbucks in the Union. We had come prepared with questions to ask him and ideas we had for the project. Our idea was creating a brochure that would help educate students about the recycling program here at Purdue. Mr. Zarate had the same idea.

This week's reading was more about proposals. We reviewed readings from last week and also read more for this week. In our proposal, we have to create a Gannt Chart showing our project schedule, what we plan to have done by a certain date. There were a few readings that dealt with creating these types of charts, and there were also some videos to watch on how to do it. The Luntz article was fairly long, but did bring up some good points. It described 10 rules of effective language.

This week's reading was about proposals. We will all be writing a proposal to a potential client for the Service Learning project. In the reading assignment in PWOnline, we learned about the types and contexts of proposals, the content that should be included, and how to organize the information. In the context section, I really liked the table. This table breaks down the proposal into each section that could possibly be used. Information and examples of what to include in each section are provided. This will be helpful to my group and I for writing our proposal.

There was not much reading for this week since we presented our White Paper projects, which I thought everyone did a nice job with. The reading for this week was about our third and final project for this class, the service learning project. I read over the project description to see what all will be expected of my group and I. From the description, I believe we will be able to continue with our recycling topic. As of now, I do not have any questions regarding the project. I am sure though as we start digging into it that some will come up.

The white paper group I was in and I are going to continue with the recycling project we have already started. There are many potential clients in the Lafayette and West Lafayette areas, as well as the Purdue community, that might be interested in working with us on this service learning project. The first organization I have in mind is the Purdue University Recycling and Refuse Department. I have spoken with the director of this department, Joel Zarate, for the white paper project.

Since there were no readings for this week, I will mainly talk about my progress in the class. First of all, I can hardly believe that it is already the 9th week of classes. This semester has flown by. I feel that my progress in the class has been going well too. My employment project turned out good, and I feel good about the white paper I will be turning in on Friday morning. I am extremely happy with how the white paper has come together. It was a lot of work though. I was not sure that it would be of good quality at first because I did not fully understand the point of the project.

So finally, my group has finished our white paper. The amount of work put into it this week has been amazing. The white paper has changed so much. We met on Sunday night around 7pm to make revisions to the rough draft that was due on Friday. We knew of some corrections and additions that needed to be made in addition to comments given by other groups. We did not have all of our figures in, the color scheme needed work, and we still needed figure captions. On Monday in class, we had a huge peer review document to complete for two other groups.