ENGL 420: Business Writing

This weeks reading was all about oral presentations, which makes sense because we spent all of this week presenting our final products for the service learning project. This PowerPoint presentation, even though it was just review, proved to be very helpful as I prepared for my speech this week. One thing that I had not thought about is how far I will need to stand from our client as I present the brochure to him. Standing too close could make him feel very uncomfortable, while standing too far away from him may seem impersonal or make him lose attention.

This week we presented our final product to the class and then to Mr. Erdmannsdorf at Von’s Shop. We performed both of these tasks on Wednesday. To prepare for this our group met on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the speech and set up a meeting with Von’s. I was unable to attend this meeting because of problems in webmail. We were the last group to present on Wednesday, but our speech went well and we got a grade that we were all happy with. Right after class we walked over to Von’s Shops to present our finished brochure to our client.

As we began creating our brochure for Von’s Shops this week I found the reading assignments extremely helpful. The first assignment that I read was the PowerPoint on brochures, flyers, policy manuals, and press releases. Actually I only read the section of brochures and skimmed over the rest. I learned a lot of things about brochures from this reading like only using once space after each sentence and putting the main selling message on the cover. The examples of good brochures were helpful, but none of them were done in an appropriate style that Von’s Shops would be looking for.

This week’s reading assignments were three different sections within PWOnline reading. The first assignment was all about “Copyright, Plagiarism, and Fair Use of Others’ Writing.” This piece talked about the ethical and legal issues involved with professional writing. It states that you always need to give credit for any work that you include in your writing that you borrowed from others. Also, you need to be willing to share all of your work to help further research on varying topics. The legal end of this article mostly talks about copywriting and how it can be used.

This week’s readings and videos proved to be very helpful as I began creating our formal proposal that is due Monday. First we read a lengthy article on “The Ten Rules of Effective Writing.” This piece was useful because it mostly addressed how these ten rules apply to advertisements and our group project involves advertising for Von’s Shops. On Wednesday I had to discuss the rule that I found most intriguing, rule nine. The ninth rule talked about the power of rhetorical questions as a persuasive tool, especially in advertising.

After successfully completing the White Paper Project, our group, Adam Corbin, Chris Miller, Nicole Sobkowiak, and David Bruot decided to remain together for the third and final project. This week most of our efforts were focused on finding potential clients to work with during this project. We decided that the three companies that we would most like to work with (starting with our first choice) are Friends of Bob, Von’s Shops, and Urban Ministry of Lafayette. After selecting our three potential companies, we needed to create a memo addressed to Mr.

This week we had three reading assignments all about how to create a proposal for our third project. First, we had to read a few sections about proposals in PWOnline. These sections covered subjects including rhetoric, context, content, and organization of proposals, as well as a sample proposal. This reading explains that a proposal is meant to be a persuasive document. It needs to convince your audience that there is a significant issue that needs to be addressed and that our group has a viable solution.

The first organization that I believe we could work with is the Art Museum of greater Lafayette. I never even knew that Lafayette had an art museum until I had to take a tour of it for my art appreciation class this semester. This museum offers free admittance to its galleries but does accept free will donations. It is clear that this museum needs some help advertising but would obviously have a small budget. I think that creating a pamphlet to insert into a newspaper such as the Exponent would be a cost effective way to spread the word.

This week we only had 2 reading responses; a document on client criteria and the service learning project description for our third and final project this semester. The Client Criteria reading assignment was very short and simply talked about what qualities to look for in a company to work with for our service learning team project. Some of the most important characteristics for the company include; being located in Lafayette or West Lafayette, no advertising department, willingness to work with us, and nonprofit or small business.

During this week our group mainly focused on editing our white paper and perfecting its design. As stated in our work contract, Nicole and Adam were in charge of editing the white paper, but we all did some of the editing in class as well. Tonight Adam is doing the last minute editing to our project and he will be e-mailing it to the rest of the group after he finishes around midnight. I volunteered to print off the white paper tonight and turn it in tomorrow since I have to go to my 8:30 class anyway.