ENGL 420: Business Writing

The only time our group met this week was on Sunday, April 20 to fix a few things on our project, as well as prepare for the oral presentation. We had our presentation on Wednesday, and got 50/50 on it, which we were all happy about. It is a relief to know that this project is finished, because alot of time and work went into creating it. We plan to meet with our client tomorrow to show him what our final documents look like, and we hope that he likes the finished product.

The end of the year has finally come. It’s hard to believe that we have made it to week 15, and the semester’s end. I really enjoyed this class because it actually taught me something. Usually in most classes, you don’t take any of the information with you after the semester, but this class definitely helped prepare me for the real world. I never knew how to create a resume or white paper before this class, and it feels good to now be pretty good at it.

For this reading response, I focused on the PowerPoint which talks about brochures and flyers. Since my group is mainly focusing on brochures and different types of flyers, I thought it would be good to review the PowerPoint and gain some valuable tips. I like how it states that your selling message should be on the cover of a brochure. The first thing people will see on a brochure is the cover, and it is critical to catch their attention. The PowerPoint also states how it is important to select the right photographs for your brochure that will tell a story.

This week has been pretty busy with just trying to contact our client to set up the meeting to deliver our proposal to him. The only time we met this week was today, in which we ended up showing our client the proposal and changing a few things. Other than that, we are just preparing to create our rough draft for the documents we plan to make. Justin Tokarczyk got a chance to e-mail the Purdue student radio station (1610AM) to see if they could put out a public service announcement, and they e-mailed him back saying that they would have no problem doing that for us.

This week’s reading focuses mostly on plagiarism. This is nothing new to me, as I have heard the same stuff about it since I was in middle school. I have never plagiarized and never will, especially because it is so easy to get caught now-a-days. PWOnline states the main guideline when it comes to plagiarism is “Give credit where credit is due.” This is obviously the best way to put it, because you should never steal anyone else’s work. The plagiarism section in the reading seemed to be just repetitive.

This week, I chose to focus on the reading from PWOnline which deals with ethics in writing. In the first section titled “Ethics and Professional Communication”, relationships between employees within a workplace or organization are stressed. It talks about how writing can shape what people do, so the way you write reflects back onto yourself. It stresses that you should write for a social good, and not just because you have to write for a certain audience.

For this project, we kept our same group: Justin T., Steve, Nate, and Justin H. We have a few different clients in mind that we would like to work with, but it seems that it has came down to Banks of The Wabash, Inc. and Goodwill, Inc. On Tuesday, March 25 at 5:00PM, our group met up to write our memo that we e-mailed to the teacher. I feel that our memo was very descriptive on what we would like to accomplish, and we hope that our plans get approved. Everyone worked equally in our group in order to complete this memo.

This week’s reading was mostly focused on getting us ready to write our proposals. During class, our group focused on looking at the types and contexts of proposals in the reading from PWOnline. There are basically two different types of proposals, solicited and unsolicited. Solicited mainly focuses on the solution to a certain problem the company or client has. There is no need to talk about the problem at hand, since it is already a known fact, which is why it is important to then persuade the reader that you have the best solution to solve that problem.

One possible client that I found on the Journal & Courier website was “The Banks of the Wabash, Inc.” They are a non-profit organization that is dedicated to preserving and keeping the banks of the Wabash River clean and safe. They want to preserve the quality of the River for both residents and visitors in the central section of the Wabash corridor. They work to preserve the historical aspects as well as the natural resources of the river, and have been doing it for many years.

It is relieving to be finished with the White Paper because we have worked so hard over the past few weeks. Overall, it was a fun project to do for myself because the topic was very intriguing. I am looking forward to our final paper, the Service Learning Project. I thought that our group could use the topic from our White Paper project for this upcoming one, but I soon realized it wouldn’t be that easy. I now know that we will probably have to go out on a limb and find an organization or business that has nothing to do with Wal-Mart.