English 420Y - Business Writing Online

This was pretty difficult for me, so suggestions would be most appreciated. Thanks.

Chapter 1 of the text really helped but “context” in perspective for me as far as communicating goes. It did a great job explaining the concept and most of the examples helped me quite a bit to understand what the text was actually telling me. Most helpful I found were the pictures followed by questions, it helped me understand how context can change pretty quickly depending on many different factors. It’s someone one doesn’t always remember to think about when writing in today’s world.

Feel free to comment. I was pretty unsure what exactly to write.

The crisis that afflicted Jet Blue was obviously mishandled at first, or it would not have been blown into the problem that it was. I agree completely with the articles that point out that Jet Blue was still a relatively young company and did not have the gift of wisdom in many of the decisions it made during the weather conditions that hit the country. This of course is not really an excuse for what happened to the Jet Blue customers, but I thought it helped established why some of the decisions that were made had been made.

Sorry, I was having quite a bit of trouble converting to PDF until I tried the Google docs application.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12221

The article is written from the point of few of passnegers during the JetBlue "meltdown". It brings up some interesting points that I had not thought of before, but is also a large amount of personal opinion. I think this will be very helpful to the project because understanding how the customers feel and what their attitudes are goes a long way in determining how one would write a response to them.

Cover letters are my Achille's heel, so please give me as many suggestions as you can. Thanks in advance.

So my choices were....page 8, 13, 20, 28, and 31. Coming in a close sixth was page 2. A lot of things stood out to me during this excercise. First of all, after you get warmed up, skimming a resume for just a few seconds becomes pretty easy and you get good at quickly weeding out the weak resumes without even reading much content. Even if a resume makes it past this first 5-10 second glance, another 10-20 seconds is usually good enough to find some content that makes the resume qualify for the trash.

I need quite a bit of help, I can never make up my mind about what looks good. Especially for activities and skills. I felt like the readings left that a little more open so I'm ready for criticism. Be gentle...

Emailing has certainly become one of the largest means of communication in my life, both personal and professional. The reading from the text was extremely helpful to me. Most importantly the sections about the subject line, the greeting, and the signature. The hardest parts of an email for me have always been the subject and the greeting. Usually my subjects end up too vague and I never know how formal to make my greeting, although I usually play it safe and go more conservative rather than less. So I was relieved when I read that is the proper thing to do.