This week, we read about oral presentations. I know that a lot of people hate giving speeches and presentations, many have the attitude "why do I have to do this, it's not like I'll ever have to do this again". However, presentations, speeches, and general communication skills are things that will be used regularly if not everyday in the work force. I have had some experience just in my 5 month internship in giving presentations.
I am the sort of person that wouldn't plagiarize on purpose. I believe in integrity and honesty, and claiming someone's work as your own isn't honest. While I may not intentionally plagiarize, I am definitely guilty of doing so rather quite often. When I think of plagiarism, I think of reports, lyrics, and other writings. I don't think of graphics, logos, slogans, phrases, or designs as something to be plagiarized. How many times have I taken a logo or a phrase/slogan and altered it a little and claimed it as my own?
I grew up with several friends that went into Graphics Design, my brother took many design courses in High School, but eventually took an Architect route, my mom is the advertising manager for my dad's stores, and my sister is a photographer that does a lot in design and layout. Basically, I grew up with design, and my whole family tends to be good at it. Through this experience, I just sort of picked up many of the rules that were discussed in the Luntz reading. However, I had never really known to do that, it just sort of became my style of design.
I know that through out this course we have discussed interpreting your audience quite a bit. However, I want to take the time now to say that I feel it is crucial to a proposal to write it only after thinking about your audience. After reading in "A Rhetoric of Proposals", they bring out differences between informal and formal proposals as well as solicited and unsolicited proposals. If a proposal is unsolicited, the audience didn't expect it, doesn't think it is necessarily an important item, and has no previous knowledge or expectations.
This week, we created our basic proposal and got our first and second ideas approved. Our first idea was to continue working with D.A.R.E. and apply much of our research from the White Paper project into this project. We have contacted the new D.A.R.E. officer of West Lafayette and are currently trying to set up a meeting with her to discuss our goals, our proposal, and what we can do to help D.A.R.E. in the community. We have met as a group once this week in order to discuss our 3 proposals for our informal proposal that we turned in on Wed.
For our project #3, we are keeping the same group as we had in project #2: Me, Kerry, Andrea, and Jen. We are thinking of continuing on with our D.A.R.E. theme and using some of our research from project #2 to help the W. Lafayette D.A.R.E. in the way of making pamphlets and packets for students to take home to their parents to help parents get involved in their child's education. Another idea we were thinking of was possibly McCord's Candies.
This week, our reading assignment was to peer edit the other group's papers. This was interesting to me, as our paper was much different from everyone else's. I don't want to say ours was better, because ours had it's own issues, but I think our writing process helped us create a document that was much more cohesive and refined than most of the other groups. I noticed during the reviews that it seemed that many groups had each person take a part of the writing, and once complete, copy and pasted the parts together.
This week, we really didn't have much to do as we just peer edited. Our first draft had some minor changes, mostly just spelling, grammar, or minor design tweaks. Because of this (and the fact that I had the original document), I was the one that did the changes (reviewed and okayed by the group of course). We have our final draft now, all ready to hand in in the morning, and are meeting during the normal class time (during our Library Visitation) to work on the presentation and hopefully get that figured out and ready.
This week was a whirlwind of activity. It all started last Friday, We had to rethink our entire stance, as I found a source that really threw a kink in our original plan. This caused us all to have to bump back all our due dates, and made this week really hard to get everything done in. We had to research, and a lot of the new research had to come through interviews, which was really hard to gather with such short notice, then we had to write the parts of the paper. This posed a challenge, as everyone was sort of lost as to how we were going to approach the new topic.
After reading through the booklet on groupwork, the thing that sticks out to me is that a group is not just task oriented, but also requires social focus as well. I have been in many groups over the course of my school and work careers, and some are just very much a "lets get this done, and never meet" type group, others are very much "let's do this as a team and make it the best we can".