“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” –Toni Morrison
This past semester I took Business Writing at Millersville University. We began with reflecting on our current writing skills. Many students seemed to also struggle with being concise in writing as I do. I found myself shortening my writing pieces frequently throughout the semester. When writing I proofread my papers with the following question in mind, does this information add to the paper? I tapped the delete button frequently throughout the semester. This struggle lessened throughout the semester. Two areas I felt that I already had a strong grip on included grammar and structure of the piece. During the semester, I feel my grades and feedback reflected the strengths I already possessed in these areas.
The first week we also worked on our business strategies. I created a home health care company called Helping Hands Home Care. I enjoyed creating a logo and finding an ideal location for the business. Successful business plans start with good purposeful locations and creative logos. During this exercise, I started to focus on tone and voice. The attitude or tone of written messages affects how a reader perceives the message. The bad news and informative letters that followed the business plan focused on tone and targeting the message for a specific audience. My letters were written for customers of the home health care agency. In my bad news letter, my tone was apologetic and let our customers know that as a business we took this event seriously. The informative letter provided information about new services and carried an excited tone stressing the benefits of this new service to our clients.
Week two focused more on tone, audience, point of view, along with the ethos, pathos, kairos, and logos throughout the Informative and Bad News discussions. Starbucks was persuasive in dealing with a bad situation that occurred in their Philadelphia store. The message delivered by their CEO was serious and informative on the corrective steps the company was taking to move forward. Facebook published their bad news message in printed newspapers which appeared to be a very odd format for the company’s digital followers. I feel someone did not think through this thoroughly or the message was intended more for investors that would be reading the papers the message was printed on. The timing of the message coincided with a recent large stock loss instead of being sent four years earlier when the breach was identified. Thinking of the audience, tone, timing, and word choices are so important in business writing. Never hearing of Aristotle’s rhetorical situations before I found these interesting yet not very useful. Maybe this information will come in handy during a party game!
Week three provided the course’s hardest assignment for me, the revision of Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlett Letter. I found this to be very difficult and an assignment I spent hours on. My writing seemed to either be too low in the reading level while the sentences per word category too high. I rewrote and revised using a thesaurus to find words with many syllables to increase the reading level while not raising the words per sentence. Concise writing was not one of Hawthorne’s specialties. He struggled like the rest of us! He frequently wrote in the passive voice and I learned quickly to change his message over to an active one during this exercise. I now find myself frequently doing this throughout all my writing. Prior to this course I did not realize how much of a difference voice makes to the reader. This is probably the most important topic I learned during this course that will be helpful in my future writings.
Week four brought discussions of our digital identity. I realized I do not have much of one. It seemed the same for many of my classmates. One day, if I decide to pursue climbing the professional ladder into healthcare management my digital identify can be used to network with other professionals. I realized that I struggle with new technology a bit throughout this semester. At home I feel like a technology wizard due to the fact my husband lives in the dinosaur age when it comes to technology. I struggled using Flipgrid and creating a WordPress blog. I love learning to use these new platforms though! This week also brought on the real work of the group business expansion project which continued into week five. My group worked well together and the work was divided up fairly. To be honest though, this was my least favorite part of the course work. I struggle with group projects. Working out timetables with other group members is difficult to fit in when you work 60-70 hours a week while pulling mom and wife duty, too. I found the actual project very interesting. I researched Taiwan and found so many interesting things. It seems to be a very beautiful country with warm temperatures, nice people, low crime, lots of art, and inexpensive travel. During my research I paid attention to avoiding plagiarism and had to remind myself how to cite in MLA. With nursing, my citations have been in APA for the past eight years or more. I updated my resume recently for clinical ladder advancement at work. This made the assignment much easier. I found a lot of value in the information on power verbs. Prior to this I did not realize that job application software searched for power verbs and skills in a job applicant’s resume. I found value in the feedback about the white space which led me to finding a more suitable layout for the content of my resume. The peer review provided me some wording changes to make the content less confusing to read. Next I reviewed a peer’s resume. I found it very difficult to review the resume of the peer I was assigned. The resume showed experience in music and band. Without a lot of experience in this area reviewing the content and providing feedback was difficult. I provided suggestions about layout, grammar, and power verbs that should have been helpful to my peer. The worst grade I received all semester was on my cover letter. I probably should have put more effort into this, but I already have a job that I do not plan on leaving any time soon. I think the lack of meaning led to poor effort on this assignment. Throughout the semester I found writing short meaningful reflections at the end of each piece helpful and a nice communication piece between the student and professor. This was especially nice with an online class.
Angela is Write 