English 420Y - Business Writing Online

By reading chapters 24 & 37, I gained a better understanding of how to communicate effectively the ideas that our group is trying to accomplish. In order to compose an interesting and attractive, as well as, informative brochure, my group members and I followed the necessary principles to develop our first draft. There are, however, some areas that need to be tweaked such as, adding more visuals and decrease some of the writing.

The two chapters in the Thomson Handbook were very helpful when considering what to include and how to include information in the brochures out group crated. The brochure that I worked on was the pet care brochure specifically dog care. The design was not chosen by me but was laid out in a unique way. The colors in the brochure lay out and the objects used for the headings provided great contrast between the topic at hand and the bulk of the information. Chapter 37 had very helpful hints on how to use variety with in the sentences that were posted in our rough brochure.

Reading chapter 24 and 37 to me, meant keeping in mind various principles and techniques in order to apply and design an appropriate brochure. In my learning the first principle was to keep in mind the Audience and design the brochure. This is very important as what u do must appeal to the audience, and if it does the project is a success. Hence satisfying the audience is the primary objective. A presentable design and layout for the brochure and then the material, with variety and conciseness was the next thing.

As described in chapter 24, the visual aids are an integral and a very important part of being expressive. As is said, “a picture is worth thousand words” stands absolutely correct. Since the pictures are of great importance, a lot of care has to be taken while deciding on the photos to be put in the brochure. A person won’t open the brochure until it is appealing with some great pictures. We tried to put some pictures that might trigger some past emotional feelings.

Finishing up the reading has really helped me start thinking more about my groups draft and how we put it together. Some of the principles from the readings have already beeen incorporated into the draft, some of them subconsciously. Other principles could probably use a little more thought, and can be used to make our brochure even more effective.

According to chapter 37, “sentences with rhythm and variety can mesmerize your readers into paying more attention and assigning greater value to your writing.” With that in mind, I think the biggest change my group needs to make to the writing portions of our brochure is to add variety to the sentences. After looking more closely at the writing, it seems that all of us used about the same length for each one of our sentences. If we varied the length of the sentences more, I think we would hold the reader’s attention longer.

After reading the assigned chapters, I think one of the most important concepts from the reading was about the audience. This is very applicable to our situation while making the brochures. We need to remember what we are trying to accomplish. We need people to help volunteer, so we need to be confident but not overbearing when asking for their help. I thought we did a great job of this in our brochure. For example, we listed out each specific duty of each of the positions that needed help. This will be very helpful for people who are interested in this project.

The draft we presented is on its way to become a much better brochure. We put a few visuals as well as detailed text that describe the event as well as the volunteer opportunities the resource center is offering. I think that we can improve on the visuals of the brochure, since we only offer images in the cover page and the last page. This could definitely add color and attractiveness to the brochure. I believe that the cover page is very well done since it is what the reader first lays his/her eyes on since we have an “attention getting” image.

After reading chapter twenty-four and thirty-seven, I found it hard to implement the theories explained. When creating a brochure with a target to children it’s hard to implement the four sentence types explained in the readings. Yet, I believe we did a very good job in trying to be both, concise and varied in our sentences structure. There are a couple of paragraphs that I believe are a bit too long, but then shortening them would leave important details out. It is also very important the image and picture implementation.

This week we had the first draft of our project due. During the end of weed five and the beginning of this week our group had not finalized exactly who was going to do what part. I received a few e-mails about group members working on the pet brochure so since I was going to be working the day it was due I decided to work on the other one. I found the text information on our web site and then looked at the Humane Society web site for more information and pictures. After finding this I began to work on the brochure in Microsoft Publisher.