Hannah Faircloth
Dr. Lance Cummings
ENG 312-001
10 December 2015
In conjunction with my business writing class (ENG 312) at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, I worked with two other students through ETEAL Applied Learning to create a report for a local real estate company, Nest Realty. This report was supposed to analyze their current social media presence and provide them with tips on how to improve. This project allowed me to apply the skills learned through the business writing course to a real-life experience.
Several of the course outcomes apply to this project, especially ‘learning strategies for collaborating with colleagues in online and culturally diverse environments.’ A large component of this project was to work with two other students in order to create a report based on several different ideas and focuses of research. Having three different minds working together on one analyzation allowed for a lot of details to be focused on and a lot of different perspectives to be seen. All of our actual report collaboration was through Google Docs, and we created a group text message to keep in touch and up to date with deadlines and requirements. While the collaboration was distant and never face-to-face, it allowed each of us to work individually on our own time and put out our own ideas and suggestions.
Throughout the creation of the report, my group and I incorporated several of the major focuses of business writing. Utilizing rhetoric, research, and applications of the rhetorical appeals, we were able to analyze Nest in different aspects of their online presence. We focused a lot on their ethos (credibility), logos (logic), and pathos (emotion). This applies to another of the ENG 312 course outcomes: ‘employ fundamental rhetorical principles to analyze the persuasive and communicative strategies of business writing in multiple contexts, using multiple genres.’ We utilized our knowledge of these appeals and principles to provide us a good basis to make suggestions. Suggestions included extending their social media usage on sites such as Instagram and Twitter in order to send their solid use of ethos through more medias, as well as building a campaign through the use of hashtags in order to provide a more direct use of pathos.
The skills gained through this applied learning project will be useful in many situations to come. I am planning on majoring in business administration with a concentration in management, so being able to analyze a company and form a good, rhetorical business proposal or report will be critical to my job. Working with people will also be a major aspect of my career, and I now have experience collaborating not only face-to-face, but also through a document and group chat.
Throughout this project, I have learned everything that I intended to and more. I expected to learn how to analyze a company’s online presence in depth, as well as improve my collaboration. Working with people on campus while not meeting face-to-face was one of the biggest lessons in collaboration and time management. The Nest Realty Report allowed me to apply research and class readings to something which showed that the skills learned are and will continue to be useful in the real world. Overall, this was a great applied learning experience and it gave me a professional, real-life experience to apply to future endeavors in the business world.
You can see my groups Nest Realty Report here.