ENGL 420: Business Writing

This week the only reading I really liked was the power point. No matter what class I am in and whether it’s the student presentation or a teacher I see a lot of the problems that were in that power point. Very often do I see the most random colors and themes that have nothing to do with and distract from the presentation. I think people are often times more interested in making an eye-catching presentation which is good until the audience isn’t paying attention to the speaker. I also hate when people make an entire powepoint and then read it to me.

This week, the reading in Group Work and Collaborative Writing Section 10 titled “Communication” was very informative. I can directly apply the lessons learned from the reading into the group I am in right now and also in any other future groups I will be in. One of the lessons I learned has to do with body language and learning to read it. A person does a majority of his communication through non-verbal messages and it is important to be able to read into what the person is conveying.

After finishing the UC Davis online booklet on Group Work and Collaboration and understanding the phases of the group and how important it is to learn in school how to function in a group because most of the real world functions in groups. I found the Apollo 13 example of just how important it is to be able to work with others is. The Apollo 13 example illustrates an extreme example how of to work in a large group, usually the issues of life and death do not come up in the everyday world.

This week in class we finished reading the booklet on group collaboration. It is important to follow the rules and keep everyone one the same page. It is crucial that all team members feel equally involved in the project. It is important to voice lots of ideas to see all sides of project. This also creates a some what uniform vision. It is also important to split the work load amongst the team members to be efficient, and to make the poject less over bearing. There is a challenge to sharing the same vision for the project.

This weeks reading was all about wonderful powerpoint. I actually really enjoy using powerpoint and I enjoyed this weeks examples. The bad example was great for when we put our presentations together here soon. Although, you would think these things would be common sense. That is not always the case. I also enjoyed looking at white papers this week. Really helped with designing ideas for our own white papers.

This week, I found the majority of the readings very useful. However, I was not really pleased with the “BadPresentations” PowerPoint. The entire document was a bad presentation in my opinion. Even the “Better Example” slides weren’t that great of examples. I’m hoping that there might have been an error with some of the slides, because many of them seemed to contain overlapping text from multiple slides.

This week we looked at powerpoints that showed us what to put in them and what not to put in them. A lot of the things that were showed or demonstrated were pretty common sense but there were some things that will be very helpful when we begin putting together our own powerpoint. We also looked at another white paper which helped in providing more ideas for layout and design. The more designs and layouts that we see makes it that much easier to come up with our own ideas as well as incorporate some ideas that were shown to us.

There were only a few readings and articles to look at this week if you include the power points on presentations. These presentations were a nice refresher of a class that I took while in high school. However I think they are unnecessary. Everyone that had the opportunity to read these already knew this information. All these tips are doing is making a student’s work habits and thought process more automated. These presentations are trying to teach the reader exactly how to be organized and presentable, but can these skills be taught with slides and bullet points?

This weeks reading showed us how to put together a good presentation for the white paper. They also showed us things not to do. These powerpoint examples will be very beneficial when it comes time to produce the presentation. We also saw another example of a white paper. This was able to give me ideas on how to format it. It showed what not to do and also what to do. We also attended a presentation on photoshop and Microsoft Publisher. I learned a few things in this presentation, but overall not as much as I would have hoped to have learned.

This week we learned about what to put and what not to put into powerpoints. This contradicted many of the things that professors have informed us of previously. This will help a lot for the presentation. We also attended a presentation at the DLC where they informed us of the different things that you could do with publisher and photoshop. Also through reading many other groups white papers from previous years we were able to determine what aspects of their white paper we liked and what parts of their white paper we didnt. This will help a lot for our formating style and content.