English 420Y - Business Writing Online

This week has been devoted to making the final changes with regards to the comments made from the Humane Society. The biggest concern I had to face dealt with the layout of the General Information Brochure. According to the Humane Society it was “funky and hard to handle.” Seeing how this was all that they specified about the layout, I assumed that they meant that they did not like the way the four column brochure would be created because they would have to use paper that is larger than a standard sheet of computer paper.

This week I focused on revising some parts of my draft based on the client’s opinion. I removed the word “stationary” from the donation part. As other group members suggested, I tried to add some more information on what donations will be used to. However, I couldn’t find any other usage of donation after interviewing the manager of CFRC community. I emailed about this to my group members to hear their opinions. All of our group members shared some similar ideas about our second draft. We had two alternative messages which might distract readers’ attention.

This week was focused on details. I reviewed the revisions and suggestions by both the client and Mr. Tirrell. In addition, I took the revision suggestions and comments from my peers into consideration while revising for the final draft. This week my group had a meeting on Wednesday. During this meeting, we were able to set the plan for the completion of the project. For example, who is going to do what, and what direction we are going to take in terms of revisions. One main topic discussed was whether to leave our submitted draft 2 a quater fold or return it to a tri-fold.

I feel that our group made a lot of progress this week and were able to improve and finish our final drafts. The first thing I did was go over the comments and our draft two brochures. I then made some changes to our draft and made some suggestions of some things that I thought we needed to look over. I then posted the revised draft with the changes I had made and with suggestions for changes that needed to be made on the wiki page. I attended our group meeting on AIM and afterwards I posted on the wiki page what we had discussed and what we each were going to do to finish our final draft.

After going through the past 2 weeks and having 2 drafts on the brochures, I felt pretty confident in my group's work. We had received positive feedback from both our instructor and our peers and our major strength seemed to be our brochures "professionalism". Then the client comments came into play and I don't know how the rest of my group felt, but I was kind of let down by their comments. Some of the things they said, while not mean in any way, rubbed me the wrong way. The biggest thing was that they said our brochure was boring, BORING!

This week began with an e-mail I sent out about meeting on Monday to begin talking about our final draft. We did end up actually getting together because Marius was not around and I had a severe migraine, so we decided to postpone the work until Tuesday. When Tuesday came around, Marius had done some work on the project but did not show up to our meeting. Erik was around for a brief time, but disappeared shortly after. Melissa M. and I collaborated on the final draft of the brochure and decided that we needed to add pictures and a background.

This week I work with Faheem on the Caring for your pets brochure. I looked for pictures while he worked on the text. He then added pictures into the text. We then rearranged some things according to size. And woala! We have a nice Caring for your pet brochure.

This beginning of this past week we spent a good deal of time looking at or original draft and getting it redone and ready to submit for a second time. Rachel did a wonderful job re-designing the brochure and I was really impressed with the way she managed to take the information in our original draft and make it neater and more concise. We had spent a while taking in comments on our draft and discussing changes through email before she sent us out the version she had been working on. We then went through it and made our own comments and made small changes.

Since I was in Vegas for work last week and did not have any time, this week I did much of the work. Matt, Samana and I worked it out that I would do the second draft revisions. With one person doing both of the revisions, it made it easier to make the brochures look uniform. I first read the instructor comments and took those into consideration. I think all the comments were very helpful. From these, I got a better picture of what directions the brochures needed to go. I changed the symbol we were using for the Humane Society since it was not the correct logo.

This week in my participation decreased a bit since I had to travel back to the US and thus had a limited access to the internet for a bit. Yet, before departing I was able to comment on the brochure in order to prepare our second draft. Futhermore upon my arrival to the US I immediatly communicated with my group, catching up with all the e-mails and finally completing the week with the weekly activity report.