Portfolio Conference

The two pieces I'd like to put in is my summary and my Visual Rhetorical analysis. I'd like to put them in because I feel like they are my favorite pieces from this semester. I enjoyed doing them and realizing how much I actually do that stuff in my real life. Normally the stuff I learn in English is stuff that I could really go without, and that finally changed my perspective! I don't know how many pieces I need to put in, but just in case, I'll put my research paper in too, because it was enlightening to find out what my major entails!! I'm just going to be challenged by all the stuff I have to do with the portfolio along with my studying!

Research Proposal

Research Proposal

The day to day communications in the business world are a very important part of the growth that makes a firm profitable and successful. Without the simplest form of communication, a firm can crumble beneath its own weight as easy a hot knife cutting through butter, and that’s why communication is imperative in today’s world. This issue deserves attention because it is at the foundation of a company, without it there is nothing to stand on and build from. The company’s whole reputation and success is at stake if they choose to neglect or cut out any communication inside the business.

            The businesses of today that are failing, or any government run organization seem to be a shining example of this lack of communication, and I hope to reach them with this proposal. In these past few years you can see a decline in the success of many of the companies that were once rulers of the economic playing field, and the lack of communication is a very big cause of this. Maybe not as much of the “lacking” and more of the “refusing to cooperate” side of communication, but they are practically the same in the end. That is why in 2010 and the 90’s you can see recessions, it’s just a snowball effect of businesses failure to communicate.

            That’s why in this research paper I will be answering the question, “What are the day to day forms of communication in the business field and why are they important?” because I believe that communication is the backbone of any business, public or private. I will answer this question by researching the many types of communication and how they influence the efficiency of the day-to-day operations of a business. The information I plan on gathering is more than likely from personal experience articles. I plan on getting information from my advisor and other articles from which the author has plenty of year of experience in the field.
            

Annotated Bibliography

Sheahan, Kyra. "What Role Does Business Communication Play in Your Day-to-Day Activities at Work?" Small Business. Demand Media, n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. In this website, the information that is given to me consists of just basic background knowledge on business communication. The website then talks about building rapport, resolving conflicts, and meetings in that order. The author describes what each one is and then what it means to a business man or woman in the day-to-day operations of a business.

Rugina, Sylvia. "What Role Does Business Communication Play in Your Day-to-Day Activities at Work?" Small Business. Sunday Times, 10 Aug. 2010. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. This website goes deeper into the reasons of how much communication in a business is imperative for its success. The author also goes into more varieties of communication in the business world and the “not in the workplace” forms of communication. She then describes how to display and promote that style of communication in the workplace and the paragraphs after.

Thorbs-Weber, Brenda. Personal Interview. 25 Mar. 2014. Brenda is my business advisor and has plenty of experience in business field, so I got the okay to poke at her and use her information for my research. She used to work for a firm in Florida before she settled and moved back to Iowa to be an advisor. The personal experience she had will be able to answer my research question and much more. I plan on talking with her after spring break!

Klinger-Wieland, Kathryn. Personal Interview. 27 Mar. 2014. Kathryn is a MIS business career service director and she has the knowledge of what is expected in my major for communication. Kathryn has some experience in the field, but mostly has done plenty of research to help college students know what they’re getting into when they get a job in the major. I will use her research to help answer my research question and get a little more knowledge into my field.

"The Importance of Good Communication Skills in Business." Street School Atom. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. This website brings up the more personal side of business communication, the part of communication where you keep a good relationship with clients and suppliers of business. This article also describes the important three rules of communication in business, which seems to be a recurring theme. The article then continues to build upon how good communication and healthy communication and lead to higher team morale and more productivity. It ends with basically saying that communication is a necessity that you run into every day and its hinges on your efficiency.

Morley, Miranda. "The Importance of Communication in Business Management." Small Business. Demand Media, n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. This article starts to describe the processes of the business communication and why it’s used the way it is used. The article also describes some good traits of a communication in the business workplace, it goes more in depth on the types and audience of communication too. The author in this piece is describes a very broad aspect of every topic that I explained, not very specific information.

Jones, Eric. "Businesses Need to Understand the Importance of Communication." Businesses Need to Understand the Importance of Communication. Insperity, 14 Oct. 2011. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. This article sums up what the other articles I cited didn’t explain too well. It goes more in depth on why certain personal communications are more important and fragile than public communications. The author then goes into explanation on what certain types of good communication there are, and what they influence and start for business. The article finishes up on the topic of why the client based communication is the foundation of a business and helps explain what good forms of that communication is.

Research Questions

What does each form of writing in the business field mean to the worker?
What are the day to day forms of communication in the business field and why are they important?

Textual Rhetorical Analysis

Tanner Mettner

English 250

Textual Rhetorical Analysis

In this summary about Business Majors, the author tries to describe all the qualities and expectations of a graduate in the workplace. The author also seems to have done research on the business world to gain further knowledge into the field. He either must be a prospecting business major or at least influenced by something to dig deeper into this subject. The summary itself has no visuals and that can lead to misconceptions about what the author means about certain subjects since the business aspect of the workplace is so broad.

In the summary the author states a lot of very factual and to the point information which leads me to think that he has done some research into the topic because either he is planning to become part of the business workplace or wants to learn more about what the business world holds for him. I say this because, not only does he go into the more fact driven parts of business, he gets into the emotional side. By the emotional side, I mean what kind of mentality and worth ethic is needed in a business major, which is evidence that there is some connection or want with the business world. I say this because; why else would the author care what the mentality of a businessman is if he didn’t want to be one?

The author also describes the qualities and expectations of a new businessman in a firm. Many of these qualities are very obvious and can be assumed by the average person, which leads me to think that the author was trying to appeal to a very basic audience and inform them of the basic details of a businessman. He conveys the purpose of this text by keeping all the information super simple and easy to comprehend. This summary would appeal to anyone who was willing to want to learn about the business major, or anyone who wants to understand how the business world functions. The very basic information and lack of technical words makes me think that the author was not trying to make this piece anything but an informational paper to appeal to those wanting to look into business.

With that being said, the style of the author is very simple. The author tries to keep the piece very informal so that he does not turn away the average prospecting college student from reading his summary. The sentences are very readable and have a very insightful tone to them. The tone is well suited for the audience because most of the people reading this article are looking for that piece of information on business majors that will help them decide whether it’s the major for them or not, and that is also the purpose of the summary too. The author’s use of transition sentences is somewhat lacking, but the paper still can be read smoothly. The similarity of all the subjects in his summary helps the transition from paragraph to paragraph.

With business being such a broad subject, the lack of any visuals of any sort really can make this paper lacking because there isn’t really a specific description of what part of business the author is talking about. There are many types of business in the world and the author really has a very broad way of speaking about them, it really can distract the reader because it is hard to follow what the author is trying to convey. But what the author lacks in visuals he makes up for in visual cues, the listing of all the information he has given in the summary is very easy to follow and helps the reader understand and get a better view of what he is trying to convey.

Visual Rhetorical Analysis

Tanner Mettner

English 250

2/12/14

Visual Rhetorical Analysis

            Communication in the business world is a very broad topic to be talking about. The extent communication is used in the business world is too big to understand, so I will focus the topic more on the big group meetings. In my visual that I got from a 2014 LBA Minority Women’s Business Conference, you can see that there is many people in one room with a central person talking to all of them at once. This is called a “Business Conference” in the business world and is the most widely used form of communication in this aspect of my major. These conferences include a wide variety of topics to use, from sales numbers to economic efficiency, but they all have one main goal, and that is to inform the masses by getting them together and discussing the goal at once.

            As you can see in the photo there is a woman on a big screen with a bunch of other colors and symbols around her to demonstrate the probable topic of the conference. In this particular conference for the Latin Business Association is women in the workplace and is supported by the evidence of a woman leading the conference in the front of the room and the high amount of women in the room. When business men and women come to a conference there is many things for the company to discuss and teach their employees and that’s why they get as many people in a room as possible, the main purpose is so that it reduces the “Telephone Effect”. The telephone effect is the impreciseness of your memory over time and that if you were to teach or spread the news of the conference, that it would be distorted or altered. That effect is eliminated by a conference like the one shown in my visual. With that being said, business conferences are as important for companies as they are for employees!

            In this case, this conference is sponsored by an association for women and the people attending are different company officials. This conference is a very informal conference as you can see by the lack of suit and ties in the visual, which means that it intends to inform friendly and very basic information to company officials to implement into the business themselves. The evidence from that is the lack of any formal types of note taking, examples being a pad notebook or laptops. With that being said, the formal conference in the business world requires that there is some sort of note taking or memorization process because the information being shared is important and is very imperative that it be remembered and distributed throughout the company. The informality of this also shows there’s more of a friendly connotation to this conference, which leads to my next point.

            Saying that, conferences are more than just a way to distribute information they are there to get the company’s name out there too. Whoever took the picture of this visual, also can be known as the author of this photo. The author obviously wanted to show the popularity and friendliness of this conference. That is seen in this picture as the lady on the projector screen with a greeting smile and such a friendly informal order of the building too. Anything that seems very laid back and friendly is appealing to a lot of people in business and the world in general, and that’s what I think the author was trying to demonstrate with this picture.

            In this form of communication, visuals are more important than words. Conferences in a way control the morale of current employees or try to invoke feelings of camaraderie or teamwork for future or prospecting employees. It’s no different in this conference, the pictures of skyscrapers and beautiful sky can be conveyed as showing success or happiness. The evidence behind that is, if the company were to put a picture of ugly slums and a rainy sky in the background, it would change the whole mood and setting of the conference. Visuals will always create more emotion and have more of an effect on a person than words will in a conference. That’s why it is important to have very bright and promising images in conferences. The colors that are mostly used in and that are shown in this visual are blue, white, and red. All these colors are vibrant and are physiologically proven to provoke feelings of success and excitement in humans.

"LBA WBC." Latin Business Association , 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 8 Feb. 2014. <http://www.lbausa.com/wp-content/uploads/minority-woman-business2.jpg>.

            The one time I felt I rhetorically analyzed a lot is when I first came to ISU, it was just like the first day of school in kindgarten. What I mean by that is, you don’t a soul on campus and you want to find some friends so you’re not alone. So I went on the journey in my dorm to find and meet new people!

            My next door neighbors had accents like they were from Chicago so that made my head jump to all sorts of conclusions, from what their personalities were to what kind of food they ate. I tend to rhetorically analyze more than I notice when I first meet people the more I think about it. My friend Aaron, who was one of the neighbors I mentioned before, at the dorm was very quiet and withdrawn at first, so I deduced that he was shy and scared of change. But the more and more I got to know him I found out that he was very open to change and that he liked to have fun, he just didn’t like bad first impressions.

            The next person I met was Austin, he was a tall, blonde, and friendly guy, so I figured by his body language that he was either popular in school because he was very open and knew how to communicate with new people or, that he was just one of those annoying people who didn’t talk. After talking to him for a while, I found out that he thought the same about me, and actually he was the same as me. He was very open and talked a lot because he played sports, and in sports you have to be open and communicate with your teammates, otherwise it doesn’t work out.

            So that’s how I found out I rhetorically analyze more than I thought. And it is a skill I think I am very good at using. I’ve always used it when I read books and talk to people, because I always want to go that extra mile to find out what actually is going through that persons head!

P.S. Sorry it was late, Freddy Court internet is in the works of upgrading that internet.