English 420Y - Business Writing Online

For my group I was responsible for working on the general information brochure for the Humane Society. When working on the brochure I tried to include many of the items that were covered in the reading. The brochure had to be concise to fit all of the information that the Humane Society wanted in the document. This meant choosing words carefully to make them most effective. The Humane Society sent us some of the text that they wanted include but most needed to be fine tuned before inserting them in the brochure.

First, because I know all my group members will be reading this post, I would like to thank Pat for working hard and getting this first draft up. I think it is a really good first draft. I think there is a lot of areas in which we can improve, but I think this is a great starting point.

Before reading the book I thought it would be pretty simple to just throw all the required information on a sheet of paper in a good order; however, after reading the book there is much more to this. It is important to have relationships between the images and the surrounding text. The words, images, color, data can appeal to readers. Good chart that lays out the visual form and the functions of each. The book includes a good project checklist that lays our rules for integrating images and tables into text. I plan on using this to help out with our project.

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.

After reading chapter 37 I began to think about how to make our brochure could a nice sentence structure. The ideas that the Thomson Handbook focused on was that sentences should be “simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex.” We used a mixture of all of these in our brochure. I thought it was important to try different types of sentences. By using different types of sentences, I think it made it easier for the reader to comprehend. Comprehension is key especially when focusing on different types of people and interests.

Chapter 24 and 37 played a very important role in the creation of our two brochures. As we began creating the brochures, we wanted to create documents that drew our audience in and kept them interested. To draw our audience in we made sure that we achieved the correct proximity. Since the proximity drew our readers in, we made sure that our brochures offered variety to keep our readers interested. We knew that if our brochures did not offer some bit of variety that our readers would become bored and eventually not finish reading our brochure.

Creating a brochure for a client that we only know through our research, seemed like it was going to be a walk in the park, but now I can see there are a lot of factors to consider. To effectively represent the information, we need to follow the principles of variety, conciseness, audience, design, and many others.

After reading Chapters 24 and 37 of the Thomson Handbook, I realized that our group has been following the principles. The main principle that I see throughout our brochure is in Chapter 24 on page 559 dealing with the design and layout elements. Our group thoroughly discussed how to display our visual content in order to catch the reader’s attention. Our use of color is bold but not distracting to the message of the brochure. We utilized lines around our pictures which showed professionalism and form.

Chapter 24 and 37 of Thompson Handbook had really useful information for making brochures. Chapter 24 explained about the use of effective design to keep the reader engrossed in the reading while chapter 37 talked about the importance of variety of language in the brochure. I feel our group tried to use both these qualities to our best abilities. The main aim of the brochure is to appeal the audience. This can be only done by having a good content, mixture of attractive pictures and a suitable design.

After reading these two chapters from the textbook, I know our group will have to take careful steps to assure we capture the attention from the person or people who will be reading our brochure. Before reading, I figured as long as all the information is concluded, the project will suffice, but this is not the case. We can include all the information we needed, but if we don’t do it in proper order, and the writing is all over the place, it will be virtually impossible to emphasize certain sections.