ENGL 420: Business Writing

This week provided a major challenge for our group. We were planning to do our on project for The Candy Bar in Chauncey Hill, but as the teacher said in class we needed to make sure that the client was going to work for us just as we are going to be working for them. The Candy Bar was the main company that we were focusing on, so we scheduled our first meeting during class time on Wednesday. We arrived at The Candy Bar at 10 o’clock, which is the time it is suppose to open, and no one was at the business.

The white paper is finally done. I am very satisfied with the final product of the paper. The design aspect of this assignment was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. The most work I did for this paper was the template. I also did the final check of the paper for grammar errors. Overall I felt that the paper went very well, and I am ready to get to Panama City so I can enjoy the break.

The paper has been going along very well. I was in charge of the design of the paper which ended up being a lot more work than I originally thought it would be. I did the entire design of the paper by using Microsoft Publisher. I found out that I really do not like Publisher as a program in general. Publisher works very well in helping with the design of the paper, but it was not very easy to use nor was it friendly to the format of the paper. It seemed that at any time it would randomly change my font or change my spacing without me telling i to change anything.

This week was very productive for my group. We decided to split the work up evenly for our outline and it worked out very well. Each person was given a particular topic and they need to write several paragraphs about that topic. Jess then took all of the paragraphs and made them into a very detailed outline. This also worked out well because it allowed our group to get a jump start on making our rough draft. I really feel that this paper is coming together well, and that the rough draft should not even be a problem for Friday’s class.

This week there was a lot to read about memos in the workplace. Personally, I felt there should have been more examples in the readings that were specific to our projects. I did enjoy the owl page on how to write memos, but it did seem as if the memo they had there was completely different than the memo we needed to write. I also found the whole idea of the memo a little comical because of the movie “Office Space”. I really felt that my team’s memo did a good job of covering all points that were necessary for the memo to be complete.

I have never heard of a White Paper until this week in class. I am still a little confused in fact to why it is exactly called a white paper. From what I have read this week for class, a white paper simply discusses a certain problem that there may be with the way something is done and it gives some ways on how to fix that said problem. I am also new to the format in which a white paper is done. To me it seems to be a lot more professional looking than any other paper I have ever needed to do for any class.

I believe that the issue of the drinking age would be a good topic for the white paper project. I have always found it weird that at 18 you can be charged with murder, sent away to war, and be considered as an adult in almost every category except when it comes to alcohol. Canada has a drinking age of 19 and it is legal for a U.S. citizen at the age of 19 to go to Canada and drink. There are 3 potential fixes to this issue. One solution would be to set the drinking age equal to the legal adult age set at 18. Another would be to make the legal adult age set up to 21.

I feel that the paper “Junk Cover Letters Kill Good Resumes” was a great paper for the class to read. It added a lot of information on the subject of why you should focus just as much if not more on your cover letter than you do on your resume. The first point brought up in the article is the fact that about 40% of cover letters are never even read. The reason for this is that the cover letter is not made special for that situation which makes the reader not care for the letter, just as the writer apparently did not care for the reader.

My cover letter will vary from my resume in many ways. The cover letter puts a person and a value to your resume. Your resume is simply what you’ve done where as your cover letter is who you are and what you are like. In my cover letter I will stress what exactly I can bring to the company that I am applying to and it will allow me to go into further detail on what the experiences in my resume actually mean. Particularly, I focused on my position at Pick-A-Tool. I will explain in more detail what I do at Pick-A-Tool and how it relates to the position at ALDI.

This past week has given me a lot of useful information for updating and improving my resume. I did not have a resume till last semester when I was in MGMT 301 and the information I received this week will help me tweak that resume to make it the job getting resume I need it to be. I especially enjoy reviewing the 36 resumes and picking out what I felt were the top 5 out of the group. This seemed very helpful to me because the 5 that I picked out were very similar to the ones almost everyone picked out. This showed me how quickly a person will look at your resume.