English 420Y - Business Writing Online

This week began with an e-mail I sent out about meeting on Monday to begin talking about our final draft. We did end up actually getting together because Marius was not around and I had a severe migraine, so we decided to postpone the work until Tuesday. When Tuesday came around, Marius had done some work on the project but did not show up to our meeting. Erik was around for a brief time, but disappeared shortly after. Melissa M. and I collaborated on the final draft of the brochure and decided that we needed to add pictures and a background.

Prof. Tirrell's Group 3 Final Draft attached.

This week, our group continued to work well as a cohesive unit. I began the week by sending out an e-mail to the group on Saturday to decide on a meeting time for Monday to work on the second draft of our project. We decided to meet on Monday around 8:30pm because our entire group could meet at that time instead of having to split the work like at our last meeting. Again, we used an AOL chat room because the class chat provided does not work for most of our members.

5:00 Appeal to Emotions: +

I believe that our brochure will appeal to the emotions of our target audience. By incorporating the pictures of the underprivileged children that our event helps, the reader can see first hand how his or her volunteer involvement can make a difference. Also, the text explains the event, further drawing the audience into the good feeling they would have about themselves if they were to volunteer.

4:00 Be Professional: +

This week our group as a whole was quite productive. My contribution this week began on Monday, August 16th, when I sent out an e-mail to the group to coordinate a time when we could all get on the group chat. It has been difficult for us to all get together at the same time because one of our members has work during opposite hours than the rest of us do. We determined that we would get on the group chat page on Tuesday night at 6pm, and the member that could not meet would look over what we accomplished and make any changes necessary on Wednesday morning.

After reading chapters twenty-four and thirty-seven in the Thompson Handbook, it became clear that the principles of variety, conciseness, audience, and design are going to be the elements of our group's brochure that really sell our brochure to the client. In general, I think my group did a sufficient using these principles in our first draft, but we definitely have some things we can improve upon.

Here are both the color and grayscale versions of the first draft of our brochure. Enjoy!

This week I contributed to my group significantly. I was the first person to send out an e-mail to the group to get the details on the best time for them to meet online in the provided chat space, or on Instant Messenger. In my e-mail, I asked that each member provide their AOL Instant Messenger screen name, the time they could most conveniently work on things, and their time zone so we could figure out the specific time frame for each person. I also assigned partners for different parts of the project.

The brochure I found was put out by the US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and the American Red Cross. It is an informative document about disaster preparedness and includes a special tornado safety section aimed at schools. The document can be found at: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/brochures/ttl.pdf.

This pdf file includes my final Corporate COmmunication Project.