Free Write

Since this weeks blog topic is a free write, I decided to discuss what I did this weekend. This friday I went downtown to watch my friend's band play at a bar. It was a lot of fun; the crowd was awesome and the music was even better. Saturday was a long day as we tailgated from noon until 6 PM. We played, we drank, we ate, and it was a blast. Saturday night was pretty low key because my friends and I were very tired from tailgating all day. Due to this, we watched American Ganster on my new TV. On Sunday I slept until noon, went to Peppino's for lunch, and then did a major cleaning of my room. I live in a Fraternity house and somehow it gets very dirty, very often. Overall it was a great weekend and I had a lot of fun.

Free Write

Cover Letters

After reading all the advice for writing cover leters, there was several peices of information that I agreed with, and several things that were new to me. For example, I never realized that your cover letter should be about the company, the prosepect, the target, not about the writer. Furthermore, I learned that most employeers only read the cover letter after reading the resume if they were impressed. One last piece of information that I found useful is to never mass e-mail your cover letter and resume. This makes sense becaue all you are really doing is signing yourself up for rejection letters. The most influential section of this tutorial and the one that will help me the most when writing my cover letter was the article titled "The best use of a cover letter." The biggest thing I learned here was that the cover letter should cover two important points: (1) what your product can do for your customer (the company), and (2) what your customer will need to do to buy your product.

Interviewing

After reading all the articles related to job interviews, I feel more confident that I have all the necessary resources needed to be successful. There are several things in particular that I feel helped me with the interviewing process. First was the article about how to deal with interview stress. This articled focused on the importance of getting to your interview 10 at least 10 minutes early, use your imagination to stay calm, and relax becasuse a relaxed job candidate is a confident job candidate. A second article that really caught my attention is the 10 biggest interview killers. I already feel pretty confident with my interviewing skills so I thought this article would benefit me by simply making sure I am steering away from major mistakes. Several of these killers to avoid are not knowing your aim, lousy nonverbal communication, making incorrect assumptions, and not asking specific questions.

Persuasion

The article that I read is located on the following website http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/chi-greenstein01dec01,0,7372215.story. It talks about the ongoing controversy of the effectiveness of the BCS system in Division 1 college football. This article is a great example of a persuasivness article. The strongest point of persuasion that this article uses is that the writer compares the BCS system to all other professional sports postseasons. It states how the BCS system is unique and cannot be ran similar to another sports postseasons. This article is similar to the MLK article "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" as well as the presentation from the US Army members that we had last week in class. All three of these pieces of persuasion have several things in common. For example, each piece uses descriptive examples and details to support the positive aspects of what is trying to be persuaded. On the other hand, I believe there is a difference between the BCS article and the MLK/Army presentation. To me, the BCS article seemed more of an opinion article than of one that presented facts. The MLK and Army presentation definitely stated opinions, but I believe the majority of the persuasiveness came from facts.