Advice to you Rookies!

Guys, if you're reading this then you have already taken your first step towards an A in business writing: You're taking class with Angie! You really can't not get an A unless you try. Do your blogs, find a group that you can get along with, go to class, turn in homework. That's it, that's all I can say. Not much else to say. The only other things I can give you advice on is a cool website that I've been looking at all day. www.ashesandsnow.org, it's the site for Gregory Colbert who does photography and film. He has some amazing pictures. Other than that, have a great time in Angie's class, you really can't mess it up. Have a good year, thanks for reading.

Distracting Ethics

Evidently, ethical problems in companies cause pretty big problems with productivity. I never knew they were that big of a deal. I guess because i haven't actually been exposed to corporate ethical problems I can't really know how I would react. Well, first thing is first, that article was full with statistics. I know that these statistics are meant to help the reader understand what how big of a problem this is, but I found them very confusing. I mean, they're saying that 36% of people find ethical problems in the office distracting, and of these 36%, one in three don't want to report them. Also, of those that find it distracting, they tell, on average, 48% tell 8 people. Of those 8 people, on average, 3 become distracted as well. I mean, seriously? I think they could have found a better way to show the numbers. Any who, I think that the problem could be handled when employees come into the company. The company should enlighten the green horns as to what to do if they encounter such a problem. At the same time, however, the company has to act on what it says, it can't just tell people what to do and when they do it the company do nothing. They can have a third party deal with these reports as well. The third party can be neutral and unbiased. They can look at the problem objectively and deal with it in a satisfactory manner.

Web writing vs plain writing

Web based writing is different from conventional business writing in many ways. Onw of the biggest differences is that people that are searching for something on the web are searching there for convenience, whereas people reading a paper document such as a book or journal or magazine have time on their hands to look for what it is they are looking for. Because of the differences in the time constraints of these two groups web based writing needs to be short and to the point. It needs to know what audience will be searching for the information and present it in an easy to read manner so that the audience will not look for the information at another location or on a another site. Formal business writing is more formal, I feel, than web based writing. Web based writing is mainly for convenience. When transferring a document formally read on paper to the web one must keep in mind the reasons for which the audience will be reading the text on the web and not on paper: Convenience, time constraints, and ease of accessibility.