Reflection On First Major Assignment

For my first major assignment I had to write an informational report discussing writing in the field that I am studying at school. From this assignment I learned many things about the business field. First of all I learned about a position at a bank that I never knew existed from interviewing someone to discuss writing for their career. I also learned about the different forms of writing that are done by business professionals, why they write them, and how. I learned how important writing is in this field and this was my first time looking at a scholarly journal for business writing. One assumption I had about writing in business was that it is short and to the point. While the “to the point” aspect remained true about writing, the short did not, especially with academic writing for scholarly journals. They were a lot lengthier than any business writing I had ever seen and was expecting.

            One of the challenges in the process of writing this assignment was finding good examples of business writing in the field because some of these types of writings aren’t published, so they aren’t easy to find, such as a business letter. Business letters are generally written to another company or person, so they aren’t accessible to the public for everyone to read, so I couldn’t really use an example from one, even though they are a big part of writing in the field. I ended up using works that were published from business professionals to provide examples, and inserted some information that I received on business letters from my interviews I conducted. As a writer, I learned that I can present the information I want to well, but organizing it in the most productive way is an issue. I also need to work on introducing and concluding my papers more sufficiently.

            I didn’t get to experience the group conference because my partner had the time mixed up, but I thought the individual conference was very helpful and would like to have an individual conference on the next major assignment. I think having a peer read your paper and provide in depth feedback on the blog is helpful, but when it comes to the actual conference I believe individual ones would be more beneficial.