ENGL 420: Business Writing

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.

The only time our group met this week was on Sunday, April 20 to fix a few things on our project, as well as prepare for the oral presentation. We had our presentation on Wednesday, and got 50/50 on it, which we were all happy about. It is a relief to know that this project is finished, because alot of time and work went into creating it. We plan to meet with our client tomorrow to show him what our final documents look like, and we hope that he likes the finished product.

Our project is finally finished and all coming to a close. We completed four documents for the Almost Home Humane Society. Two of the documents we created from our own research and information, while the other two were documents that we updated off of the original copies that we received from the Almost Home Humane Society. With the completion of these documents we plan to print out 75 color copies to give to Brenda from Almost Home. She had requested that she would appreciate 50 if we could spare that many color documents, as their funds are limited.

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.

This week went way too fast. All too soon we will have completed our brochures and be presenting to the class and to our client. This week we have focused on creating our brochures. Since we are creating parent materials for the West Lafayette D.A.R.E. program, it has minimized our research time. However, we decided that we needed to create four brochures to fully address parent participation. Each of our team members has been working on creating a brochure. Michael is doing an introduction brochure that talks about parent involvement and what to expect now that your child is taking D.A.R.E.

Since our last blog our group has met 2 times and finished the project. We met on Monday and Wednesday.

Monday we met at the Stewart Center library and outlined our brochure and information cards. We had some very good information from the Banks of the Wabash’s website and some other fliers that our client gave to us. We used these sources to put together our brochure.

Once again, my group and I are are ahead of schedule. We did not meet as a group this week. Instead we conferred via e-mail on the opinions and corrections needed on our rough drafts. We met with Brenda, from Almost Home Humane Society, on Thursday, August 17th, to show her the rough drafts of our handouts. She liked them, and is very anxious to receive our final copies next week. She also wants them in .PDF format so they can make more copies in the future.

This week our group met on Wednesday at 6:30 to work on the pamphlet for our client. Basically what we did was go online to the Purdue Innovations website and try to take photos that we felt would best represent the organization as both professional but also as an organization that students would be able to get into. So far we seem to be running on time, and I think we’ll have everything done slightly earlier than we expected.

This week our group talked quite a bit during class about where we are at with this project and what we needed to get done. Since the rough draft is due this Friday, our focus turned to the design of our brochure and just putting it all together. Michael and Josh finished up the writing of the brochure last week so Kimberly and I met a few times this week to put together all of the text along with pictures. Kimberly and I met on Tuesday and Thursday to finish up putting all the pieces together of the brochure.

This week our group started working on the deliverables for our client. We have decided to make a brochure and mass mailer for GLRSA, so they can get more publicity in the community. They have a lot of areas they need help in…they said they can always use more players, coaches, referees, volunteers, and sponsors. We are focusing on all of these things in the brochure. The mass mailer is being written in a way that it will be sent to potential sponsors so they can have more information about GLRSA and make a decision about whether or not to sponsor.