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. I think that the most important lesson from this PowerPoint is that you need to create your brochure for the customer, not the company it is created for. You need to keep their point of view in mind as you create your document and only provide information that the customer might desire. This presentation also makes a good point by mentioning that you should only ask questions that can be answered “yes.” Our group made this mistake once or twice but eventually corrected it. The other reading assignment that I found useful this week was about oral presentations for this project. This was another PowerPoint presentation; it was very short but contained a lot of good information. This presentation states that it is important to keep an appropriate distance between yourself and the audience. Also, that rehearsing is very important and you should try to anticipate any questions that your audience may have. This presentation on oral presentations is so useful because it was specifically created for this English 420 project and will become very helpful as we start preparing our speech.