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Hello and welcome to my blog on my experience with the Professional Writing course! This is where I display my assignments from said course. On this site one can find assignments I worked on myself or with fellow students. I also include my overall reflections on what I learned under the conclusions page.
Professional Profile
My name is Kirsten Elizabeth Wachsmann and I am a senior pursuing a Bachelor’s Associate degree in English.Pursuing an English-centered career is something I wanted since I was in elementary school, and it has not changed since. My goal is to graduate Longwood in May of 2019, and continue my higher education here as a grad student. In the past years at Longwood University, I was in many positions of leadership in student organizations including the Longwood Company of Bellydance and the local Live Action Role Play (L.A.R.P.) community. During the summers between semesters, I busied myself with online summer courses and multiple jobs, which include:
- Pharmacy Clerk at Stony Creek Pharmacy
- Events Assistant at Richard Bland College of William and Mary
- Events Page Editor at Richard Bland College of William and Mary
- Remedial English Teacher for the Paul D. Camp Community College chapter of the Upward Bound Program.
All of these jobs taught me the value of proper communication with my customers and/or students; as I needed to approach each situation in a professional and amicable manner that fit his or her specific needs. In addition, I also learned to have a greater capacity for patience, as certain circumstances posed a unique resolution that I quickly found.
ePortfolio Purpose and Content
The purpose of my ePortfolio is to bring together and display the projects that teammates and/or myself completed over the past few months. The first assignment I would like to discuss is the resume I edited and resubmitted. As I accumulated multiple years of work before taking this writing course, I also created a basic format for a resume. This was a small assignment and one I did the least editing on; however, it is still an important document to have when I move further into the professional world.
Another important assignment set, the Brochure and the Press Release, were a bit more difficult. I was not accustomed to the formatting of either page. However, scheduled work days with my colleagues helped me through the overall design of the projects. The final assignment my group faced was a formal report with a corresponding slideshow for our target audience. The formatting was also difficult, yet the presentation made explaining the results of the report easier. A large issue I had with this assignment is the time and effort put into editing the report. Through this assignment I learned to look over everything before turning the assignment in; as the final copy-editing proved to be a longer part of the project.
Through these assignments, I am now capable of reviewing the content of group assignments more carefully before publishing or posting it. I also achieved each of the course’s learning outcomes (listed below).
Course Learning Outcomes:
- Analyze and produce writing genres commonly found in the professional world (e.g., business, gov., media);
- Create professional documents that use plain English (clear, concise, and grammatically correct);
- Conduct research to create content for a variety of professional documents (memos, letters, reports, etc.);
- Create professional documents that uses design—standard formats, layout, use of graphics, etc.
- Practice oral communication skills to present content effectively (enhanced with multimedia tools);
- Participate productively in collaborative projects.