English 420Y - Business Writing Online

This week our main mission was to revise our brochure to provide more information and persuasion to potential volunteers who could help with the Community and Family Resource Center’s Christmas dinner. We received feedback from our instructor that caught us off guard. He even suggested that we try to refocus and have a fresh start. At first, we seemed discouraged, but we feel it actually helped us in the long run. Since we were criticized so heavily, we were able to refocus our attention on one main point rather than many.

This week I continued revising the "Caring for Your Pet" brochure that Alayna and I created. I searched online and found some more websites that offered royalty free pictures and looked over them. I was able to find new pictures for three new pictures that I put into the brochure for our second draft. I think all three of these new pictures are much better than the old ones I had in there and they make our brochure look a lot neater and more professional. Along with changing the pictures, I did some research on complementary colors.

This week our group continued working together the way we have been for the past weeks. Our group emailed each other our availability for Monday. We ended up meeting in an AIM chat room Monday night. We discussed as a good some of the changes we need to work on. Each of us reviewed the comments from the instructor over the weekend and we discussed some of the key issues that needed to be changed. Some of the issues that we focused on were mainly the text and changing some of the columns around to make them less crowded. We put all of the ideas together and started working on it.

This week our group started off by making changes to our second draft. I helped change some of the text, removed some information that was not necessary, and added a few things to the text. Most of the changes that I made corresponded to the feedback that we received on our first draft. I then did a peer review of another group’s brochure and this helped me get some more ideas and see what other groups are doing to make their brochure effective.

We started out the week by critiquing our first draft of the project. Ryan gave Steve and I some very helpful tips on how to make the general brochure more effective. The first thing I did was tone down the shade of the colors I was using. Looking back on it now, it did seem like it was more of a cartoon than information for the humane society.

This week was a little more relaxed for me. Last week Matt and I picked up a lot of the work so this week, John and Laura took charge. We were continuously posted with the progress they were making. I was able to give some feedback on the drafts before they went up on the site. A lot of the instructor suggestions and peer edits were taken into account which made this weeks brochures really good!

This week we decided to meet on Monday to start working on the second draft. Since I did not have the chance to give lots of input for our first draft in the previous week, I decided on Sunday to start the second draft revision by myself. I changed the specific parts mentioned in the feedback you gave us as well as summarize most of the text since I felt we had written too much. I did not summarize it completely since I did not want to decide by myself what parts to eliminate out of the brochure.

This week my group continued to work very well together. Over the weekend, we discussed our plans for finishing our second draft. Because of Pat's work schedule, we agreed to have our draft finished on Monday, rather than Tuesday. Beth was out of town for the week, so she didn't have much input on the second draft. Meepa and I revised our individual sections of text and emailed them along with any other suggestions we had. In my section of text, I changed the format of the information to a list. I think this helped to increase the readability of text.

This week was another very productive week. Our second draft for our brochure was due on Tuesday night and we all put a lot of positive feedback into it to get it done and make a lot of great changes to it. On Sunday night Suchet wrote our activity report to our professor. Before me emailed it to our professor he emailed to all of us and we gave him some feedback on what he wrote and them he was able to email it off to him. It is amazing Suchet is living in Singapore this morning and for the past week and a half he has been in India.

Well this week our group came though like usual. Melissa sent out an email asking when the best time to meet would be, and also if we could meet on AIM again. The AIM situation seems to still be the best way to communicate as a group. We finally decided to meet at 830pm on Monday evening. I would arrive later becaause I work unhttp://www.digitalparlor.org/su07/420Y1/node/add/blog