Month: September 2017

I’ve never been a confident test taker no matter how hard I study. The anxiety of tests, quizzes, or exams makes me hyperventilate causing me to temporarily forget what I learned. My worst fears are true and false questions or multiple choice combinations. The reason is I misread the question(s), misunderstand or misinterpret what is being asked and then make the wrong choice.  I have often been told that your first answer is usually correct. Because of second guessing myself on the English 209 quiz, I am blogging to share my life lesson and because by doing so it will also improve my quiz score. A big self-improvement that I have made is to B R E A T H E deeply when I feel like giving up!

• What stands out in your mind as something important you learned?

I would say the most important thing I’ve learned early on in this class is just how important the phrasing of your message is. I didn’t realize how many different ways there are to phrase a single message, and how much more effective some ways are than others depending on the situation at hand.

In the second week of class we went over certain writing techniques such as the audience benefits, the “you” view and parallelism.  I think that these writing skills would be very important in business writing because we’d like to be very persuasive.  Someone could be very persuasive when they try to make it sound like they have your interest in their writing.  Sounding positive is another good way to persuade people because there is no way you can persuade anyone without any optimism.  For example, one could talk about all the negatives but that probably would not convince anyone, however, if you contrast it with something positive you could leave an impact on someone.  Overall, these chapters and the activities that we did for them was very helpful but I can’t help but feel like this was some common sense stuff or something we learn in ENG 100.

Coming soon!

I’m happy to be a part of our class blog.  It’s a fun tool for me to learn and gain more power.  The power of knowledge!  This is my 2nd try at blog’N.  I know blogs can help me share and communicate with others that have the same interests and I know I can learn from others that blog.  This may sound silly?!  But I am amazed at the way technology blesses me to communicate with the World.   I like finding new ways to impress my kids and grand kids or to keep up with them, more like it!  Ciao =)

Grammar has been and still is a struggle for myself, learning how to construct effective sentences can seem like a foreign language at times as well as other things that relate to grammar. Learning the difference of compound, complex and compound-complex sentences can be hard for me to grasp at times. It is very difficult for myself to notice the four sentence types in the day to day material I read. One day I will understand why writing has so many rules and requirements, but until then all I can do is to continue to practice and get better at writing.

I currently work for a Craft Beer-of-the-month Club and am accountable for the marketing side of the business. Anticipating the audience is something I have to do daily whether its through e-mail, face-to-face conversations or phone calls.  I never really knew the steps of anticipating the audience until taking this class. Personally I did not think it made that big of an impact prior to this class. I had one template email I would tweak a little before sending it to each brewery I have contacted. Doing a little extra research on each brewery and its personnel will help me address the correct crowd instead of using the same template for each brewery. Another thing that was extremely helpful was learning the different ways of addressing a situation, whether it is addressing the situation directly or indirectly. My job mainly requires the direct approach because I want to get straight to the point, which is being interested in purchasing these breweries beers. I do deal with the indirect strategy on occasions, most of the time it is my fault for getting myself in the situation. For example, I like to cut corners sometimes and will unknowingly reach out to a brewery that do not have a high enough rating to be featured in our club. By cutting corners and not checking the rating before reaching out has put me in situations where they were interested and I went back to check their rating and realized it was too low. I then had to use the indirect strategy to pretty much tell them they weren’t good enough, which as you can imagine is not a good feeling.