ENGL 420: Business Writing

This weeks readings were on oral presentations, brochures and flyers. The readings were valuable as our group project is creating a brochure for Von's Shops. Based on the readings we will be able to incorporate what we learned into our final product. Hopefully based on the added knowledge we will be able to create a more professional product that the business will be able to use more widely. This brochure should greatly help our business partner. Even when creating the brochure we learned many new things about the business that we previously did now know.

This week we read about plagiarism. From the readings I concluded that plagiarism is very prevalent and being committed by both young students learning the ropes of writing and experienced, distinguished writers. It seems that it has almost become culturally acknowledge that plagiarism is just something that happens. Many students I feel are plagiarizing often and that they are not worried about the consequences because it is so rarely noticed.

This week we read articles on how to create Gantt charts , 'The Ten Rules of Effective Language' and articles on ethics. I gained a bit of knowledge from the Gantt chart YouTube video as I didn't even know what a Gantt chart was after even working for Corporate America. This I feel may prove beneficial during future projects and be something that I can utilize in my future career. The ten rules article was also helpful in giving you ideas to think about for writing.

One possible organization I could write for Breast Cancer today. While breast cancer currently receives a lot of attention, it is a major killer of women and can always use new awareness into the new developments in treatment. As a group we could produce fliers and pamphlets to distribute in the community. The fliers could be events to raise money for research. The pamphlets could be used to raise awareness about current research and treatment, and where women could go to find support. The other organization that I could write for is the Anxiety Clinic.

I personally feel that this project is going to be a challenging project. It will stretch the realm of my previous writing experiences. I feel that I will enjoy the project much more if I find an organization which I support, or that I am interested in what they do. I don't necessarily agree that we should act as free consultants for for-profit organizations. However, my personal feelings aside I really do think this will provide us with a learning opportunity.

This week we learned about what to put and what not to put into powerpoints. This contradicted many of the things that professors have informed us of previously. This will help a lot for the presentation. We also attended a presentation at the DLC where they informed us of the different things that you could do with publisher and photoshop. Also through reading many other groups white papers from previous years we were able to determine what aspects of their white paper we liked and what parts of their white paper we didnt. This will help a lot for our formating style and content.

This week for our group project we worked on the research and publishing aspects of the project. We took the research we had gathered and incorporated it into a workable white paper report. We then took the white paper report from a word document and incorporated it into publisher for formating and design purposes. This week we sent out a lot of emails to update each other on the progress of the project. David and I also did much of our project discussion during accounting, because the professor is terribly boring.

This week our group met during class and after class. The task on hand for this week was to determine who would be researching, writing, designing and editing. We met Thursday night from 9pm till about 11:15pm in the HICKS undergraduate library. Nicole, Chris, and I were present. David was absent because of a family emergency. David however submitted his research on the topic via email, and this research proved to be very beneficial for our outline, especially solution #3. David and Chris will be writing. Nicole and I are to edit. All four members will research and design the project.

From the class discussion on the different formats for the white paper project I noticed a few things that I liked and did not like. I feel that the white paper needs to implement many images and graphics however not overcrowd the paper with useless pictures, or graphics that do not help convey your message. I also feel that you need to have a uniform format for your white paper. This will help with the flow of the white paper. It is also important in this format to not make the appearance of the white paper to much of a research presentation or a newspaper article.

This week we finalized our memorandum for submission. Everything got a bit confusing with us not having class, but I believe that we are all caught up. We have found a number of good sources to use for our project and I believe we will be able to find a lot of good and relevant information. It turns out that our topic is a bigger problem then we originally realized. Many people and groups have raised concern about Debit Card Fraud, only proving the importance of reducing the problem. We are going to propose three plans to reduce Debit Card Fraud.