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For my final blog post, I wanted to take the English techniques that I have learned this term and apply them to what I will be doing in the future with my professional life. I am a business major and with that comes a lot of writing and a lot of communication. Having a strong sense of grammar and the rules of writing can help me immensely with being in the business field because communication is so important. If a sentence or email is read wrong or written wrong, the message could be misinterpreted or just seem unprofessional which could harm what I am trying to do professionally.

Previously, I had written a blog post about learning and reviewing plurals, possessives, MLA format, and conversations. I had also talked about the research that I had been doing for my annotated bibliography. Although they are very different things, all of these English and grammar rules that I had been learning apply greatly to what I will be doing in the future with business. I had written about a few of the rules regarding the previously mentioned topics and a few ways that I could use them.

When it comes to business and specifically marketing, writing and communication can be a crucial part of being successful. Marketing is mainly based on portraying a message and some of the rules that I had mentioned in my previous blog post could alter the message in a negative way if not used correctly. Commas and apostrophes can be detrimental to a marketing campaign if used incorrectly. For example, if a food company was trying to target their company towards parents who have kids and used a motto such as “Let’s eat, kids”, the use of the comma changes everything. If the comma was forgotten, the motto would read “Let’s eat kids” and that campaign could be completely misunderstood.

Using correct grammar could also greatly affect how you, your employees, customers, and anyone else involved in the company communicate, especially when you are writing an email. A misused comma, misused apostrophe, or any other grammatical error could come across as unprofessional so having a good understanding of the English language and the rules and syntax can keep someone in a solid position with the company. Making mistakes with the language could also cause an email to generate a message that was not intended or it could cause a message to be misinterpreted. This can affect the business in many ways especially if the email is important. If a sentence is read wrong or a message is not interpreted correctly, the receiving party could become very confused which makes the job a lot harder.

When relating this post to the one that I had written a few days ago, I would like to look again at the rules of plurals and possessives. This is extremely important in business because the way that you address someone in an email is crucial to getting someone’s attention. In the business world, people like to be addressed properly so that they feel the communication or email is more personal. If you are sending an email to more than one person and forget to add apostrophes or fail to make words plural, the people receiving the email may feel that you didn’t put effort into this communication so they will not prioritize or give a second thought to what you are saying. I personally have fallen victim to this when I was working at my internship and reaching out to possible clients. The email that we had generated to send out to all possible clients was addressed to a single person but when I reached out to a company that had two people I was communicating with, I did not alter some of the words which might have contributed to getting no response.

This can also affect getting a job in general. When applying for jobs, cover letters and communication with the people hiring others can make or break someone’s odds of getting the job. When the hiring process is competitive, a single error could cause the application to get thrown out immediately. Like I stated before, communication and writing are a crucial part of marketing and of the business world, so when you are applying for jobs, the way you write and the way you communicate are analyzed more than one would think. People who are hiring are looking for people who will excel in everything they do and that normally begins with noticing the little things such as misused grammar.

Another thing to keep in mind when writing in the business world is if you are communicating to international businesses or people. This creates a whole new chasm to dive into and to think about because obviously languages are different all over the world. However, In the business world, the main communication language is English and so it is very important to have a grasp on the syntax and rules. Communication between international countries is already much harder to interpret correctly so making sure that you at least have your words and sentences set up in the correct way is the only way that you will be successful with the communication.

As you can see, there are so many reasons that having a good idea of correct grammar and sentence structure is important in other aspects other than just knowing correct English. The instances that I have written about above are few of many where good use of grammar and the English language is so important. Many people would not think that this would be such a major thing in the business world because many people do not understand how important communication and writing is to a company. I am excited to be able to take everything that I have learned this semester and apply it to my future with the business world. I am hoping that the knowledge that I have gained will give me a leg up with my jobs and with my connections so that I am able to be as successful as I can be.

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I am working on my final paper and as much as I have enjoyed this class, I am ready for a break. This is the first time I have ever taken a J term and it definitely is very challenging but I have learned so much in such little time. I finished my review of literature yesterday and now I am starting to work on the final paper. I am very happy with how my papers are starting to turn out and I am excited to put them all together to create my final assignment. I have learned so much that I didn't know about grammar or that I thought I knew but was wrong about. I am surprised at how much I thought I was doing right but in fact there are different rules that I should have been following this entire time. I look forward to applying my new knowledge to my professional life in the future and I am excited to be able to write with more knowledge than I think I have ever had before. As this term is wrapping up, I hope to end on a very good note and do very well on my final paper. I'm very grateful for taking this class and as frustrated as I could get sometimes, I am very happy with what I have learned.

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As I am writing the review of literature, I am struggling a little to connect the sources to each other. I have no issue with connecting the conversation and the source to the poem but I am struggling with connecting the sources together in a conversation. I hope that I am doing it correctly and I hope that this assignment will help me with my writing and conversations in the future. I can't believe that we are already on week three and working on writing our final paper. I am extremely busy with life right now so hopefully I am able to find enough time to write the paper to the best of my ability and to learn from it as I am doing it. I feel like I have learned a lot this term and I am excited to put that new knowledge to use in the future. As I continue with my work this week, I am reflecting on all of the rules of writing that I did not know about before. It is interesting to see how much I was using improper grammar when I thought that it was right. As I am writing in the future I will keep these rules and ways of analysis in mind.

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I finished writing my annotated bibliography today and I think that I am very happy with how it turned out. I was able to find some sources that were very interesting and that I thought went along and related to Terrance Hayes’ sonnet very well. The first source that I analyzed was a journal about police brutality against people of color in response to the mental health crisis. I thought that the sonnet could join a conversation about how police in some areas are more inclined to act inappropriately in situations with the BIPOC community rather than with the White community. The second source that I analyzed was about how people’s attitudes towards policing and race affected the 2016 presidential election and the sonnet was actually written during this time so they have many similarities. The third source looked at how people’s implicit and explicit stereotypes about people of color and if it was reciprocated in the fact that they fear police because of implicit and explicit stereotypes. The fourth source talked about the representation of black people in the police force and how people viewed the force as a result. Finally the last source talked about aversive racism and the bystander effect. I applied this one to the question that is asked in the sonnet.

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Today I mainly focused on researching articles and journals for my annotated bibliography and I looked into how I could connect those to the Hayes sonnet. It was very interesting analyzing the articles when I had that end goal of the connection in my mind because I think that I might have viewed facts differently than if I didn’t have the Hayes sonnet in mind. The journals that I focused on were based on race and how that was related to multiple components of law enforcement such as the amount of trust, fear, and attitude towards police. I found, as expected, that the white community has a much more positive view of the police than the BIPOC community does. This is due to many factors that are now written in my annotated bibliography and I am very excited to attribute those to the poem. I went out of the box in some instances and looked for things that might relate to the sonnet in a more specific way such as how people view a person of color in power because that would change the interpretation of the sonnet due to the hypothetical that “all doctors are black”. I look forward to applying these journals and the sonnet to conversations that I could have about this subject.

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Today I watched a few lectures and read some readings about plurals, possessives, MLA format, and conversations. I also started to do some research on my annotated bibliography. The thing that stuck out to me the most was learning about plurals and possessives. I was really able to get a good understanding of how these work and I’m feeling pretty good about it. When learning about plurals, I had to go back to when I learned these all throughout my childhood and was able to remember a good amount of information on them. I did learn something that I either haven’t learned before or forgot about and it was the fact that there is one exception for when to use an apostrophe in plurals. Usually you would never use one but in the case where there is one letter and you are saying there are multiple of them, you should use an apostrophe. For example, you would say “there are two u’s in ukulele”. Without the apostrophe it would sound like you were saying “there are two us in ukulele” and that doesn’t make sense. I also learned that you should make a plural possessive by forming the plural of the word and adding an “s” if there is no “s” sound already at the end of the word. If there is an “s” sound at the end, you should only add an apostrophe.

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Yesterday and today I have been reviewing verbals from the grammar notes that were provided. I am going to used what I reviewed to adjust my paper and improve it. I learned that English has three verbals. One is the infinitive verbals. The infinitive is the pure form of the verb or the form that appears in the dictionary. The infinitive has tense and voice forms and it may have a subject, an object or complement, and adverb modifiers. These may function as an adjective, an adverb or a noun. The second verbal is the participle. It is always an adjective and they remain verbs that can take adverb modifiers and objects. There are two forms of the participle and they are present participle or past participle. The last verbal is the gerund. The gerund is the simplest verbal and is always a noun. It ends in -ing and they remain verbs, can take adverbial modifiers, and can take objects. Other than learning about this, I am struggling a little bit with writing the paper. I think that there is a lot that goes into this and I am just having a hard time finding time and motivation to write to my best ability just with the holidays going on. I am sure that if I sit down and put my best effort into it, then the paper will be very well written and I may even learn more from writing it.

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Today I am starting to write my first paper in this class and I am a little nervous and stressed about it. I have been struggling a little bit with grasping some of the grammatical rules and structures so this paper has me a little worried. I feel like analyzing isn’t quite my strong suit but hopefully writing this paper will help me understand things a little bit more and help me become a better writer. I hope that I am able to complete this assignment to the best of my ability and I hope that once I do complete it, some of the rules that we have been covering will make more sense to me. I think I am also worried about being able to come up with enough to analyze to make it long enough to fit the page requirements. Sometimes I am not able to identify enough to be able to write about it, especially with this kind of writing. Although this writing is interesting and it gets my brain working in a way that it usually doesn’t, I also am not really a fan of it. I am a much better writer when I can write what I want to write about and when it’s something that I am really passionate about and interested in. Hopefully I am able to figure out what I need to and write this paper in the best way possible.

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Today I watched a lecture on sentence parts and I took notes on the MLA Handbook and the site about the explanation of quotation marks, capital letters, commas, and direct vs. indirect quotations. After all of this, I worked with a partner on some assignments that helped me practice when to use who vs. whom and then also on subject and verbs in the sonnets. After doing all of this, I learned a lot more about how to use pronouns correctly and what kind of rules apply to that. I had to learn more about deciphering between the subjective and objective cases in sentences and I feel more comfortable and confident about that. I learned that the rules can get a little confusing but you really need to look at if the word is functioning as a subject or as an object. I also learned about when to use direct quotations and when to use indirect quotations. Direct quotations can be used when the source material uses language that is particularly striking or notable or when the author you are quoting has coined a term unique to his or her research. You use an indirect quotation when you need to summarize the key details of the text. Most of all, I enjoyed learning about the parts of sentences with Kiwi.

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After watching lectures and taking notes today, I have a way better grasp on action vs. linking verbs and I have a better idea of what enjambment is. When doing the verb activities, I was a little confused at first but once I wrapped my brain around the fact that linking verbs show the subject's state of being rather than expressing an action like an action verb would, I was able to understand it a little more. Although I definitely need more practice with it, I feel a little more comfortable identifying which verb is which type of verb. I am also learning more about enjambment. Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next that typically lacks punctuation at its line break so the reader is carried without interruption to the next line of the poem. This will help the reader speed through the line because of either curiosity about the missing part of the phrase that impels the reader to hurry on or the reader will hurry twice as fast over the obstacle of a pause because it is there. With all of that in mind, it is way easier to identify enjambments and therefore read poems in smoother way than I have in the past. While learning both of these concepts, I am struggling a little bit more with the action and linking verbs part of it. I understand it but sometimes I have a hard time pointing it out in the poems that we are reading. Hopefully if I keep practicing, I'll be able to get a grasp on it in no time.

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I am looking forward to starting Syntax/Citation/Analysis and hopefully refreshing a lot and learning even more. I have always been okay at grammar but I am excited to go into more detail about how grammar works and what is actually correct so that my writing and speaking skills can increase. In this class, I expect to learn a lot of things such as basic grammar rules that I can remember for future and I am expecting to learn even more about the technical aspects of writing. After watching the lectures, I have more of an idea of what to expect from this class and I am even more excited to see how this short term is going to go. I expect to learn grammatical terms that will help with the technical aspects of writing, use grammar to analyze poetry, attend to the differences between academic and popular style of blogging, and to learn the reasoning behind citation and citation styles. From this class I am hoping to get a bigger idea of how grammar works and how I can use it better in my everyday life. I talk and write decently well but I think that this class can help me almost perfect the way I communicate to others. I am hoping that this helps me in the future when I am trying to get jobs and for when I have a job. Writing and speaking well to others can take you a long way when it comes to the professional world and I am looking forward to using the skills that I gain in this class to propel myself up the ranks in the competitive job world.