English 420Y - Business Writing Online

My group and I accomplished a lot this week. We did, however, run into some difficulties with the Course Chat Room. This posed a problem for us to communicate on Tuesday evening and I suggested that Melissa and I communicate on AIM. She had started a group chat room, which was a great asset and notified the other members to get on AIM when they could. We all came to a consensus that we should each do an individual part and pass the document on through email.

This week was much more active than week number 5. Since we had to send our first draft I began working on it on Monday. My support for the group was the design and some of the information needed for the pet care brochure. In those tasks I worked very close to Libby who revised and added most of the information. The design started as a template in word, which I changed and adapted to the information we wanted to add.

This week helped me realize that our group can work together to help others out when they are in a crunch. I had left for Las Vegas this entire week (for my job) and literally had no time to help out with work in the first drafts. Since I contributed a lot of work to the Gnatt Chart I figured this wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Matt and Samana did the first drafts of our pet care brochure and general info brochure. I think they did an excellent job with the design principles and we are well on our way to having very professional looking brochures.

Our main focus for this week was to design a brochure both with visual and contextual components. Fortunately, every member of our group was able to meet with the others a number of times this week, so we were presented with a better opportunity to formulate some ideas for the project. Our first order of business was to designate different parts that were to be written by each member.

Because I will not be around for the next week, I am taking care of this assignment today. However, I am forced to use our first draft for the brochure without any editting. I think this will actually help us understand if our second draft is actually an improvement or not.

My "5 Minute Brochure Design Trash Test"
Appeal to Emotions: (-)

This week was filled with a lot of group collaboration. We had previously divided up the topics which needed an article to be written about. There were a couple questions regarding the legnth and detail that needed to be in each article, so emails went around between the group members. Meepa, Rachel, and I all wrote articles. Specifically, I wrote the article about the volunteer opportunities and the event discription. I tried to make them interesting to read with a more casual tone. I wanted the people who read it to feel included as part of the community and willing to help out as well.

Throughout the week, each member in group 1 worked on their designated part of the project. After coming up with a design for the Clinton County Humane Society, I had sent it to Steve who was I charge of coming up with the content for it. He then emailed me back the brochure which included the data that gave the history, mission statement, and ways to help out the organization. Steve also added in a website which serves as another advertising tool and directions from a couple major thoroughfares to make driving easy.

This week started for me on Sunday, July 15 I was responsible for the group activity report. This was not a difficult assignment, I just wasn’t sure what to put because we hadn’t done that much work yet. I just focused on how our group brainstormed and came with ideas for the project. The last thing I mentioned in the report was how we used the Gannt chart to identify who was going to do what and when for the service learning project. This helped us to get organized for the project.

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.

This week our group worked on the initial design of the General Brochure and the Caring for Your Pet Brochure for the Clinton County Humane Society. I received the general brochure design from Daniel on Monday. I thought it was a pretty good design for a brochure dealing with pets. I then added sections about the history of the humane society, ways that people can help the humane society with different types of donations, and about the humane society's mission statement.