English 420Y - Business Writing Online

The course reading for the first week was a preface to the basics of business writing. From reading, I have learned that our areas of focus in this course will be writing resumes, memos, cover letters, and other types of reports. Each one of these documents have their own forms of criteria to be contained within it. I expect the course to contain writing documents similar to these. I am familiar with writing texts similar to the ones that are expected in this class for I have done it before both in high school and in my college English class. I expect to learn how to tweak the style that I am already familiar with and incorporate the new ideas that I learn from this class accordingly. This course should aim to help us to write our own personal documents better than we already know how to do, to better our chances at overcoming the competition that we will face while applying for a job, and to help us to gain business hierarchy within our line of work. Job advancement is a very important aspect in the work force today in my opinion, and a solid writing background would increase the chances of gaining this privilege.

I have personally never had to use a resume to apply for a job. I have only worked one job since I turned sixteen, so I don't have the privilege of having experience with effectively using a resume, cover letter, or any other business text. Hopefully after this course I will know how to effectively maximize my quality of writing, but also to make sure that my text will not be overdone as to bombard the reader who may potentially view it. Much of this reading for this week describes tricks to effectively writing these documents. For example, when writing one's resume, one should keep it short and too the point. Also, one should use a sans serif font and a specific point font (Blakesley & Hoogeveen, 2008). The text delves into what criteria should be included into the resume and all it's specifics. It was a very helpful preface to what is expected but I expect that the remaining chapters in this book will make all the steps much more clear to us, and basically walk us through how to effectively write each of these texts. The Employment project that we have coming up should give us a first-hand look on knowing how to write effectively, and help us to practice before when need to actually apply for a job using our writing abilities whether it be an internship, apprenticeship, or our future careers.

Works Cited:

The Thomson Handbook (Comprehensive Edition), by David Blakesley and Jeffrey L. Hoogeveen. Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2008.