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.

My summary, in reflection is a very common assignment for me. I’ve done plenty of summary-like assignments for my classes. When I think about it, taking notes and studying for an exam is summarizing. You’re taking what you were supposed to learn and read and summarizing it in your head so you can remember it for the exam. Also, I have a class where I have to write summaries, so that’s similar too in a way ha!

            The hardest part of the summary was actually finding a good article to write a summary on. The ones I found to be very lengthy in text, were actually lacking in information because they were being redundant, and the ones I found to be very information dense were pretty short and not worth of a 2-3 page summary. The easiest part was summarizing the article. It was like taking notes in class, you just take what you read and condense it into a more concise and to-the-point form. The article had a lot of information in its paragraphs so it was easy just to translate that into a more friendly and easy to read form!

            I wish I had the peer review by a student to assist me in writing this summary, would have made things flow so much easier. Without the peer review, I had no idea if I did something wrong, or something didn’t make sense, so I had to worry about whether I was completely off or if I was right. I also wish I had time to go to the writing center and make sure I wasn’t using any of my thoughts on the article, because that’s a big no in summaries. But I had neither, so I’ll see what happens for this paper and just make sure I get my help next time!

            I learned a lot about writing in my field, there is still so many other things to learn too! I learned that writing in my field comes in very different forms. There are memos and cover letters and e-mails, and much more too! Each single form requires a different style of writing and a different audience. It’s so interesting to know that there is different ways to communicate within a business or a firm, like its ridiculous on how important it is for the style and audience to be right when you’re writing these pieces! But, all in all, I found that communication is key in the business world, which it should be for every aspect of the job world.

Business Majors are required to have an arsenal of people skills to be successful because of the rising popularity of the major. Universities and Colleges around the nation have noticed this trend, and have started to emphasize these majors more. These degrees rely on what the business does and how it operates. The degree also brings in a teamwork aspect of the job world, you’re not necessarily held to have a business job with a business major, you may branch out and do other sorts of jobs. Retail stores and restaurants are always looking for a leader/team oriented person to add to their arsenal.  There are multiple choices of courses in the major. Every choice has a certain emphasis and important difference than the other. Some courses will lean more towards stores and travel, while others are going to have an emphasis on the international spectrum of business.

As the article by The Guardian says, “The common threads of any business degree, however, tend to be looking at finance, marketing and human resource management.” So in any of the business jobs you take in the world, you’re almost guaranteed one of those three focuses stated by The Guardian. The business major has a lot of math orientated jobs as well, with all the financing needed to be done in a business; math should be of high priority! Numbers will be floating around your job no matter what job you take in business, so be prepared.

 By the time of graduation, all of those skills definitely need to be at their best. Whether it’s financing, marketing, or management, those skills are very relevant in many different ways in multiple different jobs! As a business major, you shouldn’t be afraid of standing up in front of the class to present your ideas or argue your points with other students to make sure they know your point of view. With group work a key part of many courses, your team work ethic will be at a very high caliber, you should have a key understanding of how to make sure you can comprehend all your team members’ thoughts and be able to compile them into one goal. You should also have an understanding of the ethical implications of business operations. If retail is your main focus of study, you should be able to make fair trade and price negotiation a key part of your arsenal of skills. A key part of managing others is the ability to relate to them and understand their needs, all skills you should be developing during your degree.

The downside of the uprising of students in the business major is that it cause a major change in competition in the field. In essence, the job market for business students will slowly get smaller and smaller because of the jobs being taken by previously graduated business majors. And because it's not as specialist a field as architecture or medicine, you’ll have the chance to have competition with other students who were in other fields of study that decided to choose business in their last year of college. That said, the experience you earned and all the skills you’ve gained from being a business major will help place you in a nice secure job in the City or firm somewhere in the world. These graduate schemes should give you a good general grounding in business and the chance to focus on a particular area, such as human resources, or finance or marketing.

What makes a good business major? Any business degree will involve working with numbers and stats You should also have the ability to see the big picture when it comes to making a project or long term goal happen, being considerate of the goals of the group, considering the raw materials or rough data, and developing plans to move projects forward. As a business major, you should have the ability to communicate with written and verbal information, be excellent at team work, and work well under sometimes sustained pressure.

 http://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/may/01/universityguide.businessandmanagementstudieseducationsubject

Hey gang! I want to introduce you to Ali Daly, our new employee! She is going to be joining our engineering team in our company, so I want you to get to know her well before she even gets here. Ali is went to school for engineering so she likes to be very detailed in her work, but she often needs to be brief and concise with her writings, so in light of that I would like for you guys to communicate with her on a brief and concise way. Here at Mettner.Co we like to make sure our employees feel right at home, so if you could approach her as a partner and not some innocent person that is fine with not knowing anything that would be key. I need you guys to make sure she knows how everything runs around her, even if it means she has to get a little bit of tough love. I’m sure she’ll understand because she has been in the position before with her race team. She built baja cars and mini-formula cars in college so she knows what it is like to be a newbie! You can be as blunt as you want with her about what goes on here, she isn’t much for sugar coating the truth, she chose our business for a reason! She is here to do her job and get paid, that’s how the engineering quarters do their job. Make sure you guys read this and do what it says because that how we are going to make Ali feel just as home! Thank you!

I would find out how writing works in my field by first asking someone who has experience in the field, getting personal knowledge from someone in the field is a million times better than getting information from a book or any sort of article. The library would be the second place I would look for information. The library has thousands of books and one of them is bound to be the right book to help me find out more about how writing or anything works in my field of study. The internet also is a very viable source to look for information, but not necessarily my first choice because if the possibility of misleading or incorrect information. The internet definitely is the easiest way to find information about writing in my field because the internet is ginormous! The specifics are going to be hard to find because realistically finding a source that answers my question specifically is very rare to find, and to also find a scholarly source that answers my question will be twice as hard. Maybe there is a professor out there who could help me in my search.

The piece on rhetorical reading really stood out to me from the beginning. The piece started off with connecting to me as a person because I definitely am a person who reads a book and spaces out while reading. If I’m not into the reading that happens a lot. But that isn’t the main part of the piece, she outlines how every reader should take apart a piece and try to make a reader judge what the writer is saying too. The more and more I read the piece I realized I already do half of those steps to see what I’m reading. I do that because it’s always been a habit for me when I’m on the internet. I judge the piece by its title and introduction to see if I really want to read it and then if I do I continue with the other steps to see what the writers point of view is on the situation. Now the only problem to be had here is doing these with scholarly articles, it’s not a very familiar territory for me. Most of the time I’m pretty interested in the articles I read, but the pieces I’ve been trying to read for my scholarly sources aren’t really fitting the criteria of what the writer wants. The pieces to me have gone flat and boring, they are missing out a lot of points that I want to see in an article so I can be able to write a halfway decent summary. But anyway main point of this blog is to say that the reading has really refined the way I look at articles for information, and that I really do most of the steps leading to putting things together to find a good article. This article has taught me that I really don’t need to sit there and start hard to find something good, I have to read smarter and not HARDER.

Korn, Melissa. "Wealth or Waste? Rethinking the Value of a Business Major." Wall Street Journal. 14 Apr. 2012: A1+. Print.

Snyder, William. "Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier" 

     Cengage Learning. (2000): Web. 19 Jan. 2014.

            I see myself as one of those writers like Sonia Sotomayer. I am very scared of public opinion on anything that I do, not just writing. Writing is one of the things I’m most scared of though, I have inherited through my childhood. In my childhood I had to meet so many expectations from my family. Mom and Dad always pushed me to do my best, and that was good and bad. It wasn’t necasarily just my school work, it was sports. Dad was an All-State basketball and football player for his school and expected the same out of me. Dad was on the bad side of pushing me to do better, he did the whole thing where he was never proud of me. That’s all I ever actually wanted as a kid, to be appreciated and for Mom and Dad to see me as something to proud of. Sure Mom was proud of me, but that’s what moms are supposed to do, every boy wants their dad’s approval. It drove me mad that I was never “appreciated” by Dad, he would never understand how I felt. And that’s what set up my fear of disapproval.

            I also feel that I can be a very confident writer at the same time though, which might not make sense. If I feel very passionate about that topic or want to show that I can put a valid point forward, I will do whatever is needed to express that. It is in that point where I don’t care what people think because I’m letting them know what it’s like to see it possibly from a different point of view and if they don’t respect that, that’s their loss. That’s basically how my good pieces of work come about, is that if I enjoy what I’m reading and that I feel I can have a positive impact by writing something about it.

            I really don’t prepare myself for writing too well, it’s just not me. Every English class taught me that I need to have an outline and notecards, and that just made things too complicated for me. It made me feel like I needed to have notes from to remember what I was thinking at the time or an outline to form the paper, but I can’t work that way. My best work in school came from when I would read a piece or an article of some sort and open up a text document and let my thoughts do the work. It wasn’t even like I was doing anything, my fingers were just typing and I wasn’t controlling them. That’s what kind of writer I am.

            Maybe I’m not the best writer because of my insecurities and lack of organization and that could slow me down I guess. I need to realize everything isn’t going to perfect or close to it when I try to formulate it. To be honest, I am just being way too sensitive about something that shouldn’t be. This self-perception I have about myself is definitely hindering my writing skills. I have to write like I only need to impress myself and do what I think I is right. The best writers of their time went against the rules and did something different to stand out. That goes with everything in the world. Look at the Renaissance for instance, that was full of change and artists doing things out of the ordinary. The whole world of art changed, and it was a GOOD thing, so I need to apply that to my writing, though it may be different it can be a good thing!

            Some of the writings I enjoy are research papers, if they’re on something I find appealing. I love giving out information and teaching people other things that they might not have known before. Research papers are especially fun when I can give my own input to the paper, or how I feel about what I’m writing. Being able to express my feelings on anything that I write about is something that I love doing. I also enjoy writing things with a lot of meaning, in my off time I like to write song lyrics every so often.

            There are definitely writings that I dislike, and unfortunately for any English teacher, there is a lot of things I dislike about writing. Anything that I need to prepare thousands of notes or anything that I have to prepare an outline to help “Organize” my thoughts is definitely something I will not be fond of. I’m a spontaneous writer that reads a piece and writes what I think about the piece right after I’m done while the thoughts are fresh. As I’ve said before, I’m not one to be organized or even care to organize my thoughts. I feel like the teacher is trying to refine my thoughts into what they think should be a good paper.

            It’s funny that I bring up the rule of grammar as a rule that blocks my writing. I feel it’s like an excuse to not want to write but grammar is sometimes hard to get a hold of when you’re trying to write a super long paper. It angers me when I spend a lot of time on a paper and get my point across and do great research and only get a C because of “grammar”. Like seriously? I understand yes, grammar can be important, but if I got my point across and hit all the main points what’s wrong some LITTLE grammar problems? It’s not like I wasn’t understood because I forgot a comma or anything. So when it comes to writing a paper, if I don’t feel my grammar is absolutely correct I scratch the whole sentence, no matter how great it could’ve been.

            When I went back to my blog post, I realized I focus a lot on emotion when I write, that I feed off of positive energy and use it my benefit when I write. I say this because I use the phrases “I feel” and “pep talk” often in the post. It is true that I am an emotional writer, because when I read something that sparks something in my brain or makes my heart drop, I’m instantly thinking of many different ways I could address the issue in writing. On the flip side, if I’m depressed or saddened by the reading, I am kind of scared of putting any emotion into the writing seeing as it might get ridiculed, only making it worse. I also found out from the blog that I’m very scared of being judged by my peers, they’re the ones I seek approval from when I’m not home and away at school.

This article hits a lot of points that I agree are very important to an aspiring writer or any sort of writer. Goodman brings up a lot of points that I always have going through my head too when I’m writing papers or just fun stories. She is basically saying in a very complex way to just be yourself and write what you want. This piece she writes is kind of just a pep talk that you should think to yourself when you’re composing any sort of writing. I really like how she goes to the personal aspect of writing and tells you to be positive about your work and just do your thing. As with anything you do in life, writing is just the same. In sports you are going to miss some calls or air ball some shots, you will do the same in writing. You shouldn’t be discouraged or even mad at yourself, be proud. The bad things you compose you can learn from, just like if you shoot enough free throws in basketball you will start to understand the flow of things. She also explains the public side of writing too. Like if you were to make a bad piece and the public ridicules it and critiques it, just make sure to take it with a grain of salt and make a better piece next time. But whatever you do, don’t doubt yourself, because the second you do, you’ve lost. She explains that nothing is more depressing than going back to an empty drawing board after you’ve started a project. Just put your heart into the writing and put yourself and the world of your paper. Just like you left the scene of the crime, you will have a remembrance of the place and it will come to you in detail. So if you are ever in a pickle, just think harder and try and get closer and closer to the “scene of the crime”. I enjoy this piece because its just like any motivational speech your coach would give you, you can apply this piece to anything in your life. All Goodman is saying is be a standout person and give it everything, and you will do great at whatever you do. It may not be good for others, but it should be good for you because you’ve accomplished something. That something is now a part of you and always will be, so show it off with pride!