Throughout the semester, I have struggled with adjusting my writing style to fit the needs of this class.  In every other class I have taken, it has been okay to use longer, more complicated sentences.  I have become accustomed to writing this way.  I feel like I have come a long way in this aspect.  I do not have very much trouble now when writing short, to-the-point sentences.  Another thing that I struggled with this semester, was writing the required amount of pages or words while still writing short, clear sentences.  I think that this was a problem because I was able to say everything I needed to say using about half of the required space. I feel like the rest of each of my papers was just “filler” material.  I think that this extra writing was unnecessary and defeated the purpose of writing short, direct sentences.  Since these were my only problems, I do not think that I would do anything differently.  The requirements for assignments are not something that I can change.

Now, at the end of the semester, I feel that I have an excellent understanding of the course goals.  I think that my written communication skills have improved quite a bit.  I am better able to write technical documents without having them be ridiculously boring.  I am now able to think about who my audience is and write a memo, report, etc. to that specific audience.  If this blog were intended for my peers, I know that I would be able to write much less formally.  If it were to my grandparents, it would probably be more formal (my grandfather was an English professor).

In the future, this class will help me when I am in the working world.  The assignment that I feel was the most helpful was the Resume and Job Letter assignment, as well as the Thank You Letter.  These assignments are the only ones that I felt were relevant to my future career.  The one exception would be basic, short memos, but these weren’t really specific assignments.  I did not feel like the other assignments were extremely relevant, aside from the fact that we turned them in in memo format and I will probably have to write a lot of e-mails when I have a job.

I really enjoyed this assignment (even though I did not do very well).  I fell that this was a very relevant assignment.  I will definitely use the notes I took and feedback I got from this assignment in the future when I am preparing my real resume.  I think that the most helpful part of this assignment was the Job Letter.  I liked this part of the assignment because I have never learned anything about writing a job letter.  In high school, we had to write resumes, but job letters were never mentioned.  Honestly, I do not think that I would have thought to send a letter with or before my resume when applying for a job.  It was also helpful to learn how to write the letter.  For example, I would not have thought to give them a specific time that I would call them about an interview.  All in all, I think that this assignment was a good learning experience. 

Some problems that I had with the resume part of this assignment were poor organization and vague wording.  In my opinion, the resume was easy to follow, so I am not sure what I would do differently about that.  As far as the wording goes, I should have edited this assignment another time against the checklist.   When I look at the assignment now, I can see that there are vague sentences and references.  I think that part of this is because this was a hypothetical resume.  I had to make it hypothetical because this is my first semester as an Interior Design student.  Therefore, when I wrote that I had “4 years of CAD experience,” I did not realize that there were several manufacturers of CAD programs.   Also, I did not realize that I was being vague at times.  Now that I have been in this course for several months, I can see that I should have been more specific in my resume, job letter, and thank you letter.  I think I was especially vague in my thank you letter.  I see now that this is ineffective.  Also, I did not have a consistent format in my resume.  When I made it, I did each section one at a time.  I thought that it would make sense to format each section according to its specific purpose.  For example, my “skills” section is just a list of my specific, job related skills.  I felt that it was best to do this in bullet format because no one wants to read a list in paragraph form.  I thought that a bulleted list would be easy for the interviewer to reference when looking at the resume.  If I were to re-write this resume, I think that I would keep the bulleted list but I would move it to the center of the resume.  This would give the resume visual balance, which is important as an Interior Designer.

My formal memo is a memo addressed to all Home Depot employees.  It is about a collaborative build that we are (hypothetically) doing with Habitat for Humanity.  I chose to use this topic because I used to work at Home Depot. We did a non-profit build over the summer, so the process of putting it together was fresh on my mind.  I used a lot of the communication problems that we had for my paper.  I made sure not to make these mistakes.  This was the easiest way for me to “cover all the bases” for this formal memo assignment.

To prepare for this assignment, I did the memo worksheet that we recieved in class.  This was somewhat helpful when writing my formal memo.  It helped me to outline the paper, but did not help a lot when I was actually writing it.  When writing this memo, I probably spent more time trying to find something to write about than worrying about fonts and layout.  It took me about a half an hour to outline the paper and to start a rough draft.  It took another hour or so to write the final draft. 

When writing this memo I had a lot of trouble meeting the page requirement.  By the end of the first page, I had already addressed all of the required points for this assignment.  I even added a couple extra ideas that I thought would be helpful.  I also addressed every problem that I could think of that we had over the past summer at the Home Depot.  Even after all of this, I only had half of the required text written.  This is why it took me so long to finish the final draft.  I did not want to put in a lot of extra information that was not relevant or necessary to successfully execute the goals of the memo.  I felt that by doing this, it would make employees not want to read the memo anymore.  It would not be good if employees did not get all of the necessary information for a Habitat for Humanity build just because they did not want to read the entire memo.  This is a great program and I felt it would be a shame if people did not know about it because they were too bored or overwhelmed to finish the memo.  However, I ended up just making up really long driving directions to the build site to fill space.  I do not feel that this assignment was a very good use of my time.  I believe that if you can say everything that needs to be said and be extremely clear when doing it, it should not matter how many words you write.  To me, a shorter memo that still addresses all necessary points is actually more effective.  This is because people are more likely to read something that they know will not take up a great deal of their time.

 I did not really enjoy this assignment.  I understand that there was a lot of cheating before when students wrote their own instructions, but that assignment just sounds a lot more interesting (not the cheating part, obviously).  I had trouble trying to find something to write about with this assignment.  There are not a whole lot of interesting instructions to analyze. 

I chose I set of phone instructions because they were free and I could not find anything that pertained to my major (like Google SketchUp or Photoshop) that were inexpensive.  This was a good choice as far as simplicity goes.  It was easy to analyze.  It was also easy to pick out part of the instructions that would be good for testing.  This was helpful because this allowed me to accurately decide what success was for this set of instructions.  The instructions were for my phone.  I use this phone everyday and know that it is important to be able to perform tasks on it, without using the instruction booklet.  This is what helped me establish criteria for successful instructions.  I decided that I would define “success” as a person being able to quickly perform specified tasks on the phone without looking at the instructions.  It was also necessary that each task did not take a long time.  Therefore, I decided that two minutes would be considered a “quick” time.  This is a fairly long time, but it is not that long when you are trying to remember how to do something on your phone without having the instructions to look at.

If I were able to do this paper again, I do not think that I would choose this set of instructions.  While they were great for the Instructions Selection Memo, they made writing the Instructions Analysis memo a little difficult and extremely boring.  I think if this were assigned again, I would choose instructions that were less likely to be effective and successful.  Because these instructions were well written for their specific audience, my test subjects did not have much trouble following them.  Everyone was able to perform each task under the two minute cut off.  This made it hard to discuss the instructions in the Analysis Memo.  If I chose instructions that had more flaws in them, I would have had more to discuss in my Analysis Memo.  It may also have been more interesting if there was something wrong with the instructions.   This way, I could analyze and talk about these issues in my final memo.

As I said in my reflection on the Instructions Selection Memo, I did not enjoy this assignment very much.  I realize that in previous years a lot of students cheated on this assignment.  Unfortunately, it was a much more interesting assignment.  I would much rather be on the other end of writing instructions than analyzing them.  If a students cheats on the assignment, then they should just get an F.  I think that this would have help me to better learn how to write and Instruction Memo.  This is a memo that many of us may end up writing in our future careers.  We may need to give people a list of specific things we need them to do for us or driving directions to meet us at a client.  I do not think that analyzing really helped very much.  After doing this assignment, I know what should be in a set of instructions.  I am not clear on exactly how this type of memo should be executed.

I also think that being able to write instructions instead of analyzing them would help because there would be more to write about.  It would teach us to write specific instructions that are comprehensive.  Also, it would us to meet the word requirements because we could pick instructions that would need to be very detailed.  We would also be able to pick a subject to write instructions about that we know a lot about.  In a real life situation we will not be writing about something that we know nothing about.  Therefore, it makes sense for us to pick a subject that is interesting to us and that we know something about.

The thing that I was counted off for the most on this memo was grammar.  This is something that is easy to fix.  I just did not do enough close editing before turning it in. Because this was my only problem, there is not much I would do differently on this assignment aside from editing more.  The only other thing that I may have done differently would be to choose a different set of instructions.  I chose these instructions because they were free and available.  I did not have a lot of time to go out and find more interesting instructions that were relevant to my major.  Overall, this assignment was pretty easy, it just was not very exciting or interesting.

I was in a group with Elizabeth Espie and Courtney Lewis.  For our proposal subject we chose recycling on the Texas Tech campus.  We chose this because it was something that was pretty easy to explain and write about.  Also, it was something that we could all relate to.  We all have been in buildings on and around campus that do not have easy to find or use recycling bins.  Not to mention, these few recycling stations are only for paper. 

We wrote this memo together.  We all met at the library, sat down and wrote the memo.  This worked out pretty well.  We did not have very many issues except for minor editing and we did not all agree on how things should be done later.  This was not much of a problem at the time because we did not have to actually do anything for the final project. 

During our meeting we decided who was going to do what and when they were going to do it by.  We took this opportunity to divide the group responsibilities up.  Elizabeth was in charge of reasearch, I was in charge of editing, and Courtney was in charge of delegating responsibilities.  We also decided that each person would have there parts of the project done the class period before they were due.  This timeline was helpful because it helped to clear up any possible confusion that could occur later.  It helped us to have a written timeline that we had all agreed on.  This was important to me personally because it kept me from worrying that someone would not turn something in on time.  I did not think that we would really stick to the guidelines and the timeline that we set up, but we did.

If we could do this again, I think that we would be more specific on our timeline.  We did end up having a few problems with group members meeting the timeline, myself included.  I think that if we had been more specific, there would have been less wiggle room when we were deciding how much of each of our memos and individual assignments would get done.  We never had a problem with group members not turning their assignments in on the due dates.  We only had problems getting our parts done by the dates that we agreed on as a group.  A lot of the time we would just say what we planned on doing to our parts of the project by the time it was actually due.   If we had a more specific timeline, I think that we would have been a lot more careful about sticking to it.

When writing our Rough Draft, we split up the sections of the Proposal Report.  Elizabeth did the Background, Ideas for SGA, Research and Methods sections.  Courtney did the Cover Memo for the SGA, Abstract, Table of Contents, Overview, Work Cited, and the Sample Student Apathy Survey.  My sections were the Introduction, Research Analysis, and Conclusion.

I think that splitting up the work was a good idea.  However, I think that we should have checked in with each other more often.  Instead of checking with each other before the Rough Draft due date, we just wrote our sections by ourselves and then stapled them together to turn in.  This would not have been a problem if we had been able to get together over the Thanksgiving holiday.  Unfortunately, this was not the case.  I feel that if we were able to get together inbetween the time we got our Rough Draft feedback back and the class period before the Proposal was due, we would have been able to write a more cohesive paper.

If we were to do this project again, I think we would take into account the Thanksgiving Day holiday.  I do not think that we seriously considered how much time this break would consume or the fact that we would all rather be doing other things during Thanksgiving than writing an English paper.  This mistake was most likely made because we made the timeline so far ahead of the holiday and the due date.  In another attempt at this project, I think that we would most likely agree on an earlier date to have the Rough Drafts done by so that we would have time to get together and make sure that we were all on the same page.  Also, an earlier date would give us time to add to and edit our Rough Drafts before meeting after the break to put them all together to make a final paper.

Another thing that may have helped when writing the Rough Draft, would be better communication between group members.  For a good portion of the project, I think that the only thing the three of us agreed on was that none of us were thinking the same thing in terms of the paper, it’s purpose, and how well it met the requirements for the assignment.  Part of the problem was that we all have other classes that are much more time consuming and that actually pertain directly to our major.  This made it hard to put those classes and projects on the back burner inorder to focus more time on this paper.  I think that if we had been able to get together more often or were better able to communicate through e-mail, our Rough Draft would have been easier to write.

In the end, I think our report turned out well.  We had a lot of trouble getting everything together. Once it was all put together, though, it worked out alright.

We did not sit down together as a group to write our final report.  Although, before we each wrote our final drafts of our sections, we were able to get together and make sure that each of us was on the right page.  This was a problem that we all knew was happening with the rest of the memos leading up to this one.  I think this is why we all made sure to get together before it was put together as a final draft.

I did the final editing for this memo. When editing it, I put all of our pages in the correct order and then I typed them up. I typed each page up individually to make sure that I did not miss any serious mistakes that needed to be fixed. This also helped me to make sure that the entire paper used the same wording and the same tense. As I went through the paper, I reworded each person’s sections so they were the same. This made it easier for me as the group editor. This was much easier than pulling up an already typed paper in word and trying to go through and delete parts of sentences and replace them with my corrections. I tried to do this with past memos and the sentences did not make very much sense. This method helped me to make sure that I was not making my corrections in a different tense than the paper was originally written. It also kept me from putting my corrections in the wrong place in a sentence. It may seem like this method would take a long time, but it was actually easier for me in the long run.

If we could do this again, I would suggest that we choose a more lighthearted subject.  I would suggest this because it would be easy to find something that did not require a lot of research or background knowledge.  This would have been helpful because it would not be as time consuming as the Recycling at Texas Tech Proposal that we ended up writing.  Because this report took so much time to get together and to research, it was much more of a hassel than it had to be.  I think that by picking this subject we made the project that much harder on ourselves.

When deciding what to put in our handout, we thought that it would be best to just give the class a summary of the Proposal Report.  We did this because it touched on all of the main points that we made in our presentation to the class.  We did not feel that it was necessary to put more information than that because we would be covering all of the extra information in our presentation.  To me, putting it all in a handout would defeat the purpose of making the presentation at all.  Hopefully, the students will read this and be able to remember the specific points that we made during our presentation that apply to the broad points that were listed in the Handout.

We also put a copy of the Student Apathy Survey in our class Handout.  We decided to put this in the Handout because it was the part of our proposal that Tech students would be dealing with directly if the Student Government Association did decide to administer a survey.  We felt that this would be a persuasive visual for the class.  By asking them questions like “How often do you recycle?” and “Would you recycle more if it was made more convenient?” they could see that this recycling program could actually be effective.  We assumed that most students would answer that they rarely recycled, but that they would recycle more if recycling stations were made accessable to them.  We hoped that this realization would spark something inside of them.  It would hopefully make them come to the realization that recycling is not that hard and that many people who do not recycle would do so if they were given a chance that did not involve great costs to them and their time.   We hoped that if they realized that many students would begin to recycle if a new program were implemented then they would be supportive of this idea.  This is the same idea that we had in putting this survey in the Proposal Report.  Aside from giving the Student Government Association something to use to survey the student population, it would hopefully make them come to the same realization as the regular students. 

Overall, I think that our presentation went well.  We got together the night before to go over the points taht we were going to make during the presentation.  We also decided who would talk about what.  I think that this was very helpful during the presentation because we had already looked over the information several times as a group so it was easy to talk about it during class when we presented it.