ENGL 420: Business Writing

Plagiarism is a very serious issue in society, but especially in the academic setting. The article Social and Cultural Issues talks specially about the issues of plagiarism and gives us some guidelines on how to avoid it. The most important information I learned from the article reinforced the idea that I have been taught in school so far; give credit to the author when it is not your own work. Although this is a simple idea, it is also very complex at the same time since there is a fine line between what is considered your own work and what you borrowed from others.

This week’s reading was about the rules of effective language and how we can use it. The article “The Ten Rules of Effective Language” taught me a lot of useful information that I can directly apply into my future career. I am a business management major and from what I can tell the article is written in a marketing prospective since it gives many examples from commercials. Since I have some background on the subject, I was able to easily relate to the author and see his viewpoint. Rule number eight was especially informative and I learned a lot after reading it.

This week’s reading was about proposals and specifically the Rhetoric of Proposals like the article was titled. The purpose of a proposal is to request support from your audience. First of all you need to convince the reader that there is a problem or need and that you have some sort of plan to address it. You should obviously have the background and knowledge on the issue before you attempt to propose a solution. It is also very important to have the ability to manage the proposed solution.

This week’s reading had to do with the next project we will be working on in our class. The client criteria reading informed how to choose a client and the requirements for choosing one. The first step when selecting a potential client is to make sure to pick a client that will be appropriate and help to the overall success your project. Since a majority of the project depends on what the client approves and how helpful the client will be, it is important to choose the right one.

One of my potential clients I have been thinking about is China Dragon. They are the Chinese restaurant located at Purdue West . Since they are a small business, they do not have a vast marketing or advertising department. I feel that their menu brochure they have available for customers could be redesigned in a better format. This would greatly benefit the company since we will not be charging for our service and they will get a new design for their menu from the prospective of a Purdue student who are majority of their customers.

There was no particular reading we had to do this week, but we did do a lot of reading during the review process in class. By seeing how other groups approached the projects, I was able to get some ideas that I could apply to my group's paper. I also noticed some mistakes in the other group's papers. Some of those mistakes I aslo saw that my group made. This really helped me see the flaws of my own paper and helped me improve it. One of the most important things I learned was the importance of proof reading your work and double checking the document before you hand it in.

I am happy to say that we are finished with the white paper and I was able to turn it in today. This week was a tough one where we really had to come together and do our final editing and revisions. We worked very well as a team and when it came to crunch time, everyone did their part. Most of editing was done by Lauren and the final revisions on the formatting was done by me. I also printed the color copy version of our document and got got it bounded at a printing store. Although the majority of our project is complete, we still have to work on our presentation.

I have had a couple problems posting this blog. I might have not tagged it correctly or I have had some computer issues but for some reason it did not want to post. Hopefully this time it will work. I think that we are working well as a group and everything is on schedule. We had no problem finishing our outline on time. One issue came up was that Cedric was originally supposed to edit the final outline but he could not gain access to the google documents website. This did not cause any problems whatsoever since I just told him to email me his part and I would do the editing.

This week, the reading in Group Work and Collaborative Writing Section 10 titled “Communication” was very informative. I can directly apply the lessons learned from the reading into the group I am in right now and also in any other future groups I will be in. One of the lessons I learned has to do with body language and learning to read it. A person does a majority of his communication through non-verbal messages and it is important to be able to read into what the person is conveying.

This week went really well with our group project. We were able to finish the rough draft of our white paper and complete the majority of our research and writing portion. We were supposed to meet as a group on Thursday in the computer lab to work on our formatting and put together our paper but I was not feeling well so I could not attend. The rest of the group still got together though and was understanding of my situation. Since I was not able to help out on the formatting, I suggested that they e-mail me the file they worked on and I would put my part in and edit it some more.