Purpose

I chose to take a Writing for Business class at UNC Wilmington to improve my professional communication skills. One aspect of the class is to complete a service learning project in which my group and I will analyze the rhetoric used by a business – Nest Realty. We will also analyze their approaches to social media. One final result of the project will be a white paper that we’ll write to the Nest team. The course outcome I feel will be highlighted in this project is using “effective practices of design and rhetoric to compose and publish multimodal texts or business audiences”.

I feel this result is most relevant to my academic interests. Upon graduation, I wish to pursue a career in either journalism or public relations (PR). Journalism is my passion, but I’ve come to understand it isn’t the highest-paying field. Entry level writers make an average of $21,000 in the South East. For this reason, I am also considering employing my writing skills in PR. This is where the course outcome applied. As a PR practitioner, I would communicate both directly and indirectly with audiences, both on and offline, while working with clients and helping them achieve their business goals.

In this project, my group and I will create a white paper while collaborating on writing through Google Drive, mostly asynchronously, since this is an online class. One of the obstacles we face is that one of my team members does not have consistent access to the web, or a computer. Time management is one of my weaknesses, but I realize we cannot afford to flexible with deadlines we set, since this group member will only be available to submit work at certain times.

One of my goals is to be more strict on myself about not procrastinating and being accountable to my group. My experience with strategic writing through previous courses will be useful for this project. Strategic writing describes professional writing that meets certain agreed-upon standards. Examples of this are memos, white papers, reports, and newsletter articles.

Additionally, I have experience in managing social media, through a brief stint as the social media manager for UNCW’s Style and Modeling Company last semester. I learned about Facebook analytics, post scheduling, and using buzzwords to reach target audiences. I’m a blogger as well as Lifestyles Editor for UNCW’s newspaper, The Seahawk, so I can apply my knowledge of writing for the public in this project.

Outside of personal experience, I intend to draw from course teachings. I have learned that the basic elements of persuasion, or rhetoric, as noted by Aristotle are ethos, logos and pathos. Ethos is used to build credibility, logos establishes arguments, and pathos helps communicators to connect with audiences by appealing to emotion (Shwom & Snyder, pg 165). I’ve noticed that Nest uses pathos in social media by posting “pretty pictures”, and the company surely uses other rhetorical methods as well to establish their web presence.

 Overall, I look forward to this project and expect to learn more about how a brokerage operates and maintains their communication with clients and their target audience.

References

Shwom, B., & Snyder, L. (2013). Guide to Using Social Media for Business Communication. In Business Communication: Polishing Your Professional Presence (2nd ed.) Prentice Hall.