ENGL 420: Business Writing

This week’s readings were on the service learning oral presentations. These PowerPoint’s were really helpful to my group and I when we were preparing for our presentation. It gave us an idea of what we should include in our presentation, how we should go about presenting it and what we should answer in our presentation. The PowerPoint’s focused on audience analysis, talk structure, and delivery of the presentation. Keeping in mind who you are presenting to is really important and also ties into how you present the information to your client.

This week’s readings were all about oral presentations. They have been really helpful considering my group and I are giving our presentation next week. I have learned that in most businesses and organizations decisions are usually made during face-to-face meetings. So being able to present this document my group made to the class will help us out a great deal when we have to actually present to our client. I have never given a presentation in front of anything but a class so far. This made reading tips for giving oral presentations a great resource to go to while I prepare.

This week we have been really successful on our service learning project. At the beginning of the week we delivered the proposal to our client. Our client accepted the proposal we wrote for him. This helped us give the go ahead on starting the rough draft of our brochure. We met on Tuesday, April 8th to brainstorm what we wanted in the brochure and how we wanted it to look. In class on Wednesday we discussed when we were going to meet again to work on the final draft. We decided to meet Friday around 3 o’clock at Hicks to work on our rough draft.

This week we did not have too many readings which I am glad since my group has been working hard on our final project. I had to read about copyright, plagiarism, fair use of others’ writing, gender in the workplace, and ethics editing checklist. The first three parts were really important to read. It is something I will be able to keep in mind doing other papers. I had an idea of what certain copyright and plagiarism meant but the readings went into more detail which was great. This in sum is making sure to give credit where credit is due.

This week’s readings have been really helpful while working on the third project. The online technical writing: proposals was a great help when my group and I started to work on the proposal due Monday. There was a section on common sections of proposals which we looked at for a reference when we were creating our proposal. It was really helpful because it went into detail for each part of the sections. One thing that is required for the proposal is a Gantt chart. I have heard of this kind of chart before but did not know how to go about making one.

This week the readings have been really helpful in preparing our memo and proposal for the third project. We broke up into groups during class on Monday and each group was assigned a section to read. Then we got back together and talked about each section. This was really helpful to be able to see what other people thought were important in the readings. I learned a lot in these readings that will prove to be helpful in this third project. One thing I never even heard of was solicited vs. unsolicited proposal.

As a group, we have decided to continue our topic on Purdue’s recycling inefficiencies. This topic is already very familiar to us, and we are comfortable working together. This week of the project has been kind of slow due to the class cancelations, so we would estimate our current project status is still in the drafting stage. However, because we have much of the needed information regarding recycling at Purdue, we will begin speaking with the representatives at the Purdue Grounds Department in the near future (Week 12).

My group and I will be using the same topic we had for the white paper project. This topic was Purdue recycling. There are many potential clients in the West Lafayette and Lafayette areas that might be interested in working with my group and I for this service learning project. One that makes the most sense to work with would be the Purdue University Recycling and Refuse Department. My group has already spoken with the director of the department for the last project and seemed interested in what we were working on.

Since there was only one reading assignment for this week I will be writing about that and how I feel I am doing in the class. This week we had to read about our third and final project along with a client-based requirements page. For this next project, groups will be formed of 2-4 members. I am going to be in the same group I was in for the last group project since we all got along so well. For this project we will be asked to locate a real client who works for a non-profit organization, academic department or small businesses.

Since there were no readings for this week I will be writing my reading response about my progress in the class. I will also be writing about the peer reviews each group did. So far I think I am doing pretty well in the class. I am going to be redoing my resume and cover letter so I can try to improve my grade. Although I did well on it I feel that I could do better. I think this will be helpful in the end by having a better resume to give when I apply to jobs. This week in class we worked on peer reviews that had much more in-depth questions on the second day.