Clayton Athman, Patrick Murray, Gabin Tene.
Writing in a Business Setting
I want to learn more of the business side
of writing because I know that it will be a huge advantage to be well versed in
how to write in a concise manor. I recently had an interview, and even though it
was not for a business position, in order to get the interview I had to show
that I could paraphrase a much longer peice of information into a short
statement. Though I think that I do a good job at keeping my paper short and to
the point, I want it to become second nature and habit to write in a business
like manor. Employees do not have time to read long and detailed writings or
memos and because of this the concept of abstract writing is something that is
going to be very helpful in writing memos and other business type documents if I
hope to run a business in an efficient way. Abstract writing is a form of
writing used to fit a large amount of information into a limited amount of
space. A technique that would greatly benefit a business.
The side of
business that most interests me is the side of sales and learning to communicate
with customers properly would give me a big advantage. If a customer opens an
email and sees that it is a page long, they will be much more apt to skim
through and miss valuable material that will benefit them. How does one go about
preventing this? In the same example, if a customer opens and email and sees
that it is organized in bullet points or in a short paragraph they will be more
willing to read the entire email and gain all the information they need. This
can take a large amount of time on the part of the writer because he must know
inside and out what he is trying to communicate and be able to break it down and
write it in a way that highlights only the main points. An indirect benefit of
learning to writing in a business setting or writing to customers would be that
if I learn to write this way, it will spill over into how I communicate verbally
with my costumers and employees and overall will have a very positive effect on
my work environment.
Writing in a Technical
Setting
I want learn the technical side of writing because
I will need to be able to write many procedure and analysis reports in my
career. Many people think that
engineering is all math and science and nothing else, while engineering uses
lots of math and science it is more of an application of them. Engineers seldom work alone and for
themselves, they typically work in groups and for a company. For this reason one
needs to be able to communicate clearly and in detail about their work to other
groups working on the project, their bosses, and most importantly customers.
An example of this would be me working for a company that makes
snowmobiles, my boss says he needs a new sled for 2014, so all the engineers get
together and break up into groups to work on different aspects of the
snowmobile. Group “A” is designing the body of the snowmobile and group “B” the
engine, group “B” needs to know what group “A” is doing otherwise they will make
two parts of a snowmobile that do not fit together. Group “A” needs to be able
to document what they are doing and present it to group “B” so they know how big
and heavy the engine is so it works with the body of the sled, they then bring
it to their boss to get it approved.
A technical paper may include the following elements;
1.
Introduction
2.
Procedures
3.
Results
4.
What the results
mean
5.
Recommendations for
future work
6.
References and
acknowledgments
Writing in a Technical Setting
My name is Gabin Tene and I'am
going for mechanical engineering. Writing about this topic will be a great
benefit skillswise because engineers are most of the time asked to write
technical reports. A great example to come up with would be for instance, a car
company (Mazda) would like to get some specific steels from another company (US
steel) in order to manufacture cars frame. One of the engineers from the Mazda
company is then asked to write a report concerning the exact steel specifition
they want the contractor (US Steel) to manufacture. Meaning that the report
should include maximum shear force and Strength the steel must support,
temperature the steels must support when exposed to either hot or cold
temperature, and many other specification.
After the report is done, It
comes now to the contractor to follow step by step the specifications on the
report during the manufacture of the steels. If there are mistakes or on the
report, the manufacturer could wrongly manufacture the product. And this will
cost a lot for the company.
That's some of the reasons why writing a
technical report is very important for me.
