ENGL 420: Business Writing

This weeks reading was about what should and should not be included in fliers and brochures. It was stated that one of the most important parts of the project is the opening page. Four out of every five people were said to never get past the cover of a document, we should all take this very seriously while creating our final documents. A business may waste valuable money on the inside of a flier or brochure when the money could be better spent to lift the cover page of the item. Another important idea is that it is better to use real life pictures when possible.

This week in class we discussed ethic and plagiarism. Many students now try to elude the system thinking that they can get away with that fact that they stole something. That is what plagiarism is, it is the stealing of some form of publication and attributing it as their own work. If I person wouldn't walk into Walmart and take something then why would you steal something off the internet. Respecting each other and each others work is a big part of being ethical. We read several articles on plagiarism, one of the first described someone actually plagiarizing a code of ethics on plagiarism.

The main portion of the reading assignments this week involved our project proposals. Many examples of different types of proposals were given and well described. These included internal to external, and the solicited or unsolicited proposals. Each of these proposals involves a different approach to getting our points across to the client. In the article “The Ten Rules of Effective Language”, ten simple rules were given to help project to our clients what it is each of our groups are trying to accomplish.

Most of this weeks reading was about how our client based service-learning project should look. The proposal will be on the lower end of the formal side of things. As groups we must establish ourselves as creditable so as to make our clients feel like they have the right people assisting them in improving there organizations. Basically it is our job to show the client how there business can improve with our help. By establishing a more professional view of ourselves from the start we can more easily bring this positive view across.

#1 Young Life- it is a non-profit organization that is involved in activities for High School aged teens; these activities involve a biblical message, group game, ECT. I think that it would beneficial to this organization to have more local advertising in the form of fliers or possibly a new letter to increase the publics knowledge of the group and its goals.

I think that this project could be slightly more enjoyable then the other two. It seems like it will be a very hands on project. The idea of actually creating a project that could potential benefit the community and raise awareness of something that could possibly help others really excites me and I am very eager to get started with this project. I have a few Ideas in mind both of which involve programs for kids, not necessarily an after school program but something on those lines.

This week much of our effort was directed at the revision and review of another's white papers. I'm sure many groups found this process as helpful as we did. It was very helpful to see what the other groups thought need work with in our paper. It made it very easy to revise once everyone had given there input on how they all thought the first draft of the project went. Now the groups have to turn there attention to the presentation, which most of us do not like to do.

Finally after Several days of peer reviews and team meetings we are starting to make the final choices on what are final paper is going to look like. I think that all the members of my team came together very well. We each contributed to a section of the paper and now we are starting the process of editing the paper so that it all seems to flow together, and one member of our group is going to take care of the final presentation of the paper that will be turned in.

My team and I are current in the process of pulling our rough draft together. We have yet to make any decisions on the layout of the paper, but after the resent class for on the applications I don't believe we will have much trouble. So far all members of my group including myself have completed the primary research and we are currently in the process of bringing it all together. We have planned a group meeting for Thursday in order to finalize the rough draft to be turned in on Friday.

The continued reading for Group collaborative work, gave even more insight on how to get your group working together on the right terms. The planning sections gives a good look at how to break down and project and set deadlines. That has been one of my groups problems we haven’t established deadlines, and where we are not struggling to finish, we still could have made things much simpler by setting a time limit on certain tasks that need to be completed. As far as the separation of the different aspects of the project, I feel that we handled that very well.