After reading the tips on oral presentations from PWO, I learned that giving a presentation has a lot to do with audience analysis. This point has been reinforced throughout the whole semester, but I think it is an important one. It is very important to distinguish how you see the audience, and more importantly, how you want them to see you and your presentation. The text gave an example contrasting speaking formally in a suit and speaking more informally dressed casually.
The document on plagiarism was a nice little refresher course on citing and crediting work that is not our own. This was a very good article, because I do believe that people need to understand what plagiarism is. However, personally, I found the article to be boring, because I am sure I am not the only student in the classroom that, after finding out we were going to be reading about plagiarism, said to himself “Are you kidding me?
After reading the first section on ethics, I learned that business writing and all writing affects more people than one may think. Not only does the writer need to keep the interests of the audience and himself in mind, he also has to worry about his responsibility to many other people like his family and community. In this way, writing, I learned, is its own form of ethics. We take into account the responsibility to be ethical to all of our different types of audiences to produce a document which serves the purpose of informing while also making everyone better off.
This week we read and learned about proposals before submitting our proposal for review on Friday. I learned from reading some of the PW Online that the proposals are supposed to be persuasive. I learned that we need to convince someone that we want/need whatever it is that we are asking for. Credibility would play a large role in this, because if the reader feels in any way the he or she can't trust you for some reason, then your proposal is sure to fail. Therefore, you need to build up your credibility, which can be done by researching well and being honest.
For the service learning project, I have two different clients in mind. Hopefully, from these two, one will be readily available and will be able to be used for my project. My first client is the Beans Coffee Shop located in the MSEE building on campus. For this client I would set up a marketing campaign to increase sales. Currently I don't believe this coffee shop has any advertisement around campus. My second client would be a local elementary school. I would like to create a pamphlet and try to raise awareness and funding for one of their after school activities.
Client criteria was the first document I read about the next project we are going to do. I didn't know that the organizations had to be small or non profit. I think that is a great restraint, however, because larger companies are usually already immersed in advertisement and they are much more apt to deny any help from a group of college students. Also, I think it is a great idea to leave the client in control of where all meetings take place. This is the most professional and from past experience, I know this works well.
This week I spent the majority of my time reading through the DARE white paper. This was a very nice white paper in my opinion. The creative aspect of the paper was very nice. It had a great color scheme and some good pictures to go with the text. The paper itself was also very good. I don't know how much I agree with the solutions they were trying to implement, especially the one about trying to create the same environment in every classroom. I think that every environment is different, and that officers would have to go about teaching DARE in different ways under different circumstances.
This week our group did a very nice job of collaborating to finish our white paper. I revamped my draft and turned it in to Lauren for editing on Wednesday. She edited the rest of the paper, then sent it to Filip for the final touches. We definitely did a nice job of communication throughout this process. I felt like we always knew exactly what the plan was at all times. This made the project run very smoothly for our group. Thankfully, Eric and Filip did a fantastic job with the creative aspect of the paper.
After reading the section on “norms” in the collaborative writing booklet, I realized what typed of norms my own group has. For example, our group seems to have the norm of meeting once a week outside of class. Our group also seems to have the norm of interrupting eachother at many times in order to ensure that every sentence written down in the best possible. At first I thought this was a bad norm, but after thinking about it a little more, I think it is a good thing, because we are not disrespecting eachother, we are all simply trying to do what is best for the group at all times.
This week our group's goal was to get the rough draft ready to be turned in by Friday morning. This meant that every individual had to do their own work. We brough everything together Thursday afternoon in the Matthews computer lab for finishing. When I got to the lab, Eric and Lauren were already working on formatting the paper. I was extremely impressed when I saw the work Eric had done with the multimedia aspect of the paper. He definitely went above and beyond everyone's expectations for the week, so kudos to him.