English 420, Business Writing

This was another productive week for the team working with Hungry’s on the Service Learning Project. We finished the White Paper on Sunday and turned it in Monday. Joey was responsible for drafting the contract with Hungry’s, but the group had to meet once more to determine exactly what we would be doing for the business. Since it is a very young restaurant, they had a lot of needs, so we had to determine what we could do given our skills and the amount of time left in the semester. From here, we divided some of the primary deliverables amongst the group based on everyone’s experience.

Our group spent the past week finalizing our White Paper presentation and creating the paper itself. The presentation presented several challenges. When we opened up PowerPoint, for some reason the slides would blend together as you went throughout the show. This may have been because we used a background from PowerPoint 2007, even though we saved in a 2003 format. Fortunately, we made a handout which helped show changes we could make to the organizational structure.

Attached is a memo of our group's service learning project proposal. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Here were the company possibilities we came up with for the Service Learning Project:

Hungry's
Image Source Photography
Insomnia Cookies
Scoops
Yats
Campus House Coffee Shop
Other new restaurants by Chancey Hill

Our group spent the week before Spring Break writing and researching our rough draft for the White Paper. I was responsible for the introduction and our idea for developing a recruiting strategy. One of the advantages Knight Corporation has over competitors is how much it pays its employees compared to the average for the area. In researching Southern Indiana, I found the average salary is about $13,000 less than what Knight Corporation pays.

Team, attached is a copy of the full White Paper draft. Please let me know if anything needs to be changed prior to class today.

Attached is some information about New Albany that we can use in regards to the workforce and how Knight Co. compares to other companies in the area.

Attached is text to place during the InDesign technology presentation today.

This week our group began with the objective of finishing the technology presentation. Drawing upon skills learned while on my high school newspaper staff, I will be using InDesign to create the text for the White Paper. One advantage InDesign has over Word is the ability to do page layout and design. This means you can set up a paper with three columns, insert text into two of them, and then use the third column to include graphs, photos, or key quotations. Our group will also show many of the functions necessary to create a professional White Paper cover page.

This was a very productive week for the management team. I spent a good portion of class time playing around with Adobe In Design, the software program we chose to present. I have Adobe Page Maker experience from my high school newspaper, and this software was the predecessor to In Design. A few things have changed though, so I emailed my high school newspaper advisor to see if he had a handout he used to train his staff. Unfortunately, he did not have any such document, however he advised me to utilize the Help menu, because unlike other programs, In Design’s can be very helpful.