Marketing assignment -Business & Finance
1. As I begin the process of pursuing a degree, focusing on my Résumé Virtues, what am I doing to continually enhance and refine my Eulogy Virtues? (300 words
2. Imagine that your story is going to be part of a video. Write a paragraph (or approximately 300 words) describing what you want and how your college education can help you get it. See the Paragraph Sample and Structural Outline for Creating a Paragraph for an example. I HAVE ATTACHED
Sample Paragraph: Goal Setting and Motivation
(This corresponds with Activity 1.5 in Workshop One. Refer to the course resource information, “Structural Outline for Creating a Paragraph,” located directly below this sample paragraph as you complete Activity 1.5.)
My college education can help me with three goals I want to achieve: spiritual, social, and professional growth. As someone who has only been a Christian for a year, I believe my education at IWU can help me grow spiritually. For example, the Bible application assignment in Workshop One of this course has already helped me grow in my spiritual understanding that God made me with the special talent of caring for others through giving hugs. I also believe my study can assist me in growing socially. I have been told that many courses will have group assignments, and I believe those will push me to be a better contributor to a social unit because I would never want someone else’s grade to suffer from my lack of participation in a group activity. Finally, I assume that my time at IWU will aid me to develop skills that will cause me to improve professionally. The second course in my degree is a personal psychology course (PSY 155). I believe that to be successful professionally I need to understand what motivates me psychologically to do my best for my company, and I am confident the psychology course will help me increase that kind of self-awareness. I look forward, then, to achieving my desire to improve in the areas of Christian understanding, group contribution, and career awareness through my coursework at Indiana Wesleyan.
Scroll down to see “Structural Outline for Creating a Paragraph”
Structural Outline for Creating a Paragraph
Often you will be asked to write a “paragraph” in response to a discussion post for your IWU courses. The following information is designed to help you understand the basic expectations implied in any assignment requesting a “paragraph” response. Typically, a paragraph has three major parts: 1) a topic sentence (one sentence), 2) support for the topic sentence (at least three sentences, often longer), and 3) a concluding-summary sentence (one sentence). The following outline describes the principles and goals for each of these three major parts of a paragraph.
1. Topic Sentence: This should be the first sentence of your paragraph, and it should identify the main topic of the paragraph as well as what approach you plan to take to that topic. (Example: In the sample paragraph, the main topic is the “goals I want to achieve.” The approach is to prove that I can achieve those goals through my college education.)
a. Inclusive: Be sure to include in your topic sentence all the elements that the assignment requires you to cover. (Example: this particular assignment is expressed in a single short sentence [“write a paragraph describing what you want and how your college education can help you get it”]; however, it actually requires four elements:
i. What (identify what you want)
ii. Wanted (make it clear that the “what” is something you want)
iii. You (identify yourself as the person doing the wanting)
iv. How = College education (make sure you clearly promise to prove how your college education will help you achieve what you want).
The color coding of this sample topic sentence makes it clear how each of these four elements have been included: “My college education can help me with three goals I want to achieve: spiritual, social, and professional growth.”
b. Exclusive: Be sure to exclude any topics that are not explicitly required by the assignment. (Example: Notice that in the color-coded topic sentence above, once all of the required elements are colored, there are no large sections of text left uncolored. If there had been, that would likely have been a good sign that you were trying to prove something not called for in the assignment. Sometimes on this particular assignment, students are tempted to talk about why they want something from college. While sharing the why might be true and even interesting, because this assignment did not ask for a why, you should exclude discussions of the reasons from this particular paragraph.)
c. Specific: You should always strive not simply to prepare generally for what you plan to prove in your paragraph, but whenever you can prepare specifically (without making your topic sentence long and awkward) you should do so. (Example: Notice that in the topic sentence sample the writer does not simply prepare generally for the fact that three goals will be proven, but prepares specifically and briefly for three specific kinds of goals: “spiritual, social, and professional growth” goals.)
d. Brief & Unified: Your topic sentence should always be a single, unified sentence.
2. Support:
a. Inclusive: Be sure to include support for each of the main topics you promised to prove in the topic sentence. (Example: Notice there is a support example for each of the three goals promised: spiritual, social, and professional growth.)
b. Specific: Be sure that you are not supporting simply by making general claims, but by actually giving specific examples. (Example: notice for each of the three kinds of growth, the writer begins with a claim and then backs it up with a specific example. For instance, this is a general claim: “As someone who has only been a Christian for a year, I believe my education at IWU can help me grow spiritually.” This claim is then supported/proven with this specific example: “For example, the Bible application assignment in workshop one of this course has already helped me grow in my spiritual understanding that God made me with the special talent of caring for others through giving hugs. “ Also notice the specific details given within the specific example. The writer does not just say generally that the Biblical application assignment helped him grow in his understanding, but he gives a specific kind of understanding growth: “that God made me with the special talent of caring for others.” Even the “special talent” is not left general, but is specified as “caring for others through hugs.”)
c. Exclusive: You want to rigorously exclude attempts to try to prove anything whatsoever other than what you promised in your topic sentence. In other words, avoid digressions. No matter how interesting or true, if you did not promise to prove it in the topic sentence exclude it from the paragraph.
d. Organization:
i. Classification: Try to make sure that each example is distinctly different from the others and that none of them overlap or repeat each other. (Example: in the sample paragraph the categories of spiritual, social, and professional are distinctly different and do not overlap.) Be sure to group similar examples together, and try to keep dissimilar examples separate from each other.
ii. Order:
1. Strength: Generally, start with one of your stronger examples, end with your strongest examples, and “bury“ any weaker ones in the middle of your paragraph.
2. Topic Sentence: If you gave a list previewing your support examples in your topic sentence, be sure to follow that same order in your support section (as was done in the sample paragraph).
e. Explicit: Remind the reader regularly throughout the paragraph how and where you are explicitly proving what you promised to prove in the topic sentence. Usually, this is done by using key words from your topic sentence (or synonyms of key words) throughout the paragraph. (Example: Since one of the main points of the topic sentence was that it was through the writer’s college education that the goals would be achieved, you will see that at the beginning of each of the three major sections of the body the following phrases are explicitly included: “my education at IWU can help,” “my study can assist me,” and “my time at IWU will aid me.”)
3. Concluding Summary Sentence: It is best at the end of a paragraph to restate your topic sentence as a way of wrapping up your paragraph, attempting in the process to remind your reader how you proved your topic sentence position in that paragraph. You never want to repeat yourself word-for-word; therefore, you’ll want to use some synonyms in this restatement. (Synonym Example: notice that “Christian,” “group,” and “career” function as synonym replacements in the concluding sentence for “spiritual,” “social,” and “professional” in the topic sentence.) (How Example: also notice that the list of growth goals has shifted from one word per item in the topic sentence to two words per item in the concluding-summary sentence. The addition of an extra word for each item in the list is an attempt to remind the reader more specifically how each goal was proven. For instance, the second goal [social growth] was proven with an example about learning how to contribute faithfully in social/group assignments. Therefore, the two-word summary reminder “group contribution.”)
