Progress Report

Thus far in the Spring 2019 semester

My progress this semester has been a subtle, yet surprisingly significant learning experience so far. The first contents we covered were the audience, purpose, and tone. As a marketing major, these concepts were not new to me. A good marketer constantly considers these three things. However, prior to this class, I had not thought to apply these questions to the way I write, nor did I realize how much writing is integrated into business. In my field of work, I find myself constantly writing emails, descriptions, catchphrases, slogans etc., all of which must consider audience, purpose, and tone. A great example of this is when I created this digital ad for SUU’s summer semester.

After putting up the ad, I asked the marketing department to post it on their Instagram. They came back to me and told me that I might want to consider remaking it to look more like SUU. Now I could have taken this and gotten upset, but I was seeing that this is the process in a professional workplace, and ultimately, this is how better products are made. I didn’t want to ruin my relationship with the marketing department. So I met with them and took their feedback. I now realize that I had thought of the purpose, but had not thought of the tone or audience. The marketing department had told me they thought it looked like it was for younger kids. I was trying so hard to make it look exciting and like summer, that I had forgotten the tone of the ad and didn’t realize my target audience. After much group work within my department and peer review process with the marketing department, a final version was created.

It didn’t occur to until now that this is all because of the things we’ve learned in class. My experience with me and my department meeting with the marketing department was a mirror image of when we did peer review for our infographics.

The final product was due to the repeated peer review process, which is another thing that I’ve learned this semester. When we (me, my boss and the marketing department) were reviewing the final product, I thought back to my experience in class when we were reviewing each other’s infographics. Even the creation of the graphic itself used parts from our infographic unit. The thing I had to keep thinking about was, “how can I best portray the information so it’s easy to digest for my viewer?” the same thing I asked myself when working with my group to create our infographic.

I found the correspondence unit to be really helpful because writing emails is such a huge part of not only work, but also getting a job in the first place. Through this, I learned what the correct opening/closings are to use in different scenarios. Most of all, it expanded my thinking to make me think about how tone comes off of paper, or in our case emails. My generation knows how to text, we do it so often. Texting is often very casual and often 2 sentences or less. In addition, grammar isn’t a big deal and sometimes it’s actually considered to be weird to have too much grammar in a text. However, writing an email is a completely different format, and I haven’t done it nearly as often. In writing an email, it’s at least semi-formal, correct grammar is necessary, and there is a talent needed to make sure the message you are conveying is both, easy to digest, and as polite as possible. I don’t find it difficult to make it easy to digest, but making it formal and polite as possible are the two things that challenge me. I tend to not want to reread emails, and this results in my emails coming off slightly standoffish, and not as friendly as I’d like. It’s weird but I have to force myself to be over-the-top nice in writing emails to convey the tone I desire. The correspondence unit challenged me to take that time and that is something that I found to be very helpful in my work today.

When talking about the correspondence unit, I briefly mentioned grammar. I consider the grammar part of writing an email to be the easiest part. However, although I passed the grammar quiz on the first try, I know I could improve on many of my grammar tendencies. Just today I found this old review I wrote about Centro’s Pizza.

I remember consciously trying to keep the my review from being flamboyant, and instead polite and constructive. Although I may have achieved that, there is much to be desired in my sentence structure, and most of all I used the wrong there. When I saw this I was disgusted with myself. Even though I wrote this a year ago, I have been told to use the right there for over ten years and this is just unacceptable. If only a year ago I was using the wrong there, I don’t want to think about the many other mistakes I have made and continue to make today. I know I’ll never have perfect grammar, but my goal is to improve by continuing to challenge myself to review my sentences before submitting them.

When I think about in-class attendance and participation assignments my brain immediately goes to the phrase “busy work”. Here is why my brain is wrong. I don’t think in-class attendance is the part my brain associates with busy work. This is because I think in-class attendance should be necessary for every on-campus class, and I don’t care whether the professor decides to punish students implicitly (by them not getting the information as easily), or explicitly. Participation assignments are what my brain auto-associates with busy work. Whether or not they are labeled as busy work, these assignments are a necessary practice.

I’m grateful we are given time in class to do many of them because whether or not we have the time, they are necessary. The ones we have done online have been a great way for me to expand my thinking about the topic at hand. The infographic article, for example, made me think about how there wasn’t just one way to design an infographic. I realized that it really depends on the information, the tone, purpose, and audience. There is no one answer for the right way to do an infographic. Even though the article was from 2011 (which is commonly presumed to be outdated in today’s day and age), it had some relevant information. I’m not going to pretend that the article is perfect because “data viz” isn’t a phrase any kids say let alone the “cool” ones. However, for the purpose of what we were learning, it was in fact credible. It is credible because it is written by someone who co-founded an infographic design agency located in Seattle, WA. This was a learning experience for me because, in the past, I had always assumed that if it was that far in the past, it was out of date. Now I know that there is more to credibility than just the date.

One suggestion I might make to challenge us more would be to first create a small assignment for us to do at that incorporates small pieces of each unit we will cover throughout the semester. Then at the end of the semester give the exact same assignment with instructions to not look at our old one. The last assignment would be to compare each one and recognize where we have improved, and where we could improve further still. This would give both you and myself feedback on how much I’ve actually learned beyond my grade.

I hope that this report has successfully shown you my growth as a professional writer thus far in your class. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about my progress in certain areas and I will be happy to answer them.

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