ENGL 420: Business Writing

Being that we talked a lot about oral presentations in class today, I thought it would be appropriate to read up on tips for giving oral presentations. The thing about oral presentations is that they are much different from speeches. Speeches are written out and delivered from some sort of a podium, and are delivered in a way in which the speaker talks to the audience. Presentaions are public speaking arrangements in which the individual is talking ABOUT the presentation in a rather informal way.

This is a subject that has always baffled me as a college student. As undergraduates, we are sort of like lightning - we take the path of least resistance. Usually this comes in the form of referencing Google on whatever topic we have been assigned to research, and then spitting off exactly what we've learned in our own words, with a website address in the "references" section, hoping to God and crossing our fingers that our professors are too lazy to actually look up our references, which 99% of the time they are.

When it comes to working in a team, you have to consider what's fair, and you have to consider your obligations to the team itself. Perhaps the most important thing to consider is what you are promising to provide the client in exchange for what you are demading, and whether or not it is fair. If you know that the project is only going to take you ten hours to complete, but you are charging $2000 because that's the going rate, is that ethical? How do you decide the ethics of such a charge?

For those of you who may notice, yes I'm late getting my reading responses done. So don't get confused when you see me writing about topics we learned about two months ago. That being said...

So far everything has been coming along great. We were actually very surprised at how serious the Purdue Innovations Club was about helping us help them. Before we even began talking about deliverables, they got together as a club and decided what would be best for us to do. They established the expectation that we would focus our efforts on creating marketing deliverables that they could use next semester to boost enrollment.

There are two organizations that I would like to help with this Service Learning Project. The first one is SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise). I used to be a member of the club, but not anymore. The cool thing about working with a club like this is that they are a Service Learning Club! The stuff that we are considering doing for this project is stuff that they do all the time! Yet, they never have enough time to really promote themselves. So my group could help them do that with a full-blown marketing campaign.

So I just got done reading the guidelines for the third and final project, and I have to say that this is going to be by far the most challenging. I've had a couple of sales jobs already in my young life, and if there is one thing that I have learned, it is that for the most part, business owners are real jerks. They tend to think that their time is just so much more valuable than anyone else's, and for the most part, they are very short and cocky.

As we continued on this week with the White Paper project, we had to read and critique more White Papers. The one White Paper that I learned the most from was the one on Global Warming. As I read through it I learned a lot of things. First, I learned the importance of using White Space effectively. It is very easy to have too much blank space on a page, unequal distribution of white space between quote boxes, and entire unused columns. So I really applied that knowledge to our group's White Paper as I formatted it this week.

This week was quite busy as we put the first draft of our white paper together. On Friday of last week I sent out an e-mail to all of my group members letting them know what I needed out of each of them so that I could take their completed material on Monday and start putting the paper together. Two out of the three of them came through, which was nice, but I still had to cover for the guy in our group who couldn't pull his weight. As a result, he was fired from the group.

So we ran into a couple of road blocks this week before we got back on track. Originally, our group decided to do our project on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which supposedly was designed to close the pay gap between men and women. But after doing more research into it, we realized that there was no real pay gap when all factors such as maternity leave, skills, education, and hours worked were taken into account for men and women. When everything was computed, there existed a 2-3% pay gap between men and women.