I am an excellent writer and editor, it comes naturally to me and I take pride in my written work. More people in the United States fear public speaking than fear death, but I am not one of them. I can stand up and present to a group of any size so long as I am adequately prepared, and can even do impromptu speeches.

My business writing has improved appreciably over the past ten weeks. After receiving a less than stellar grade on my first ever graded memo, I sought out help outside of class from a friend who used to grade the memo assignment in years past. She and I met three times and discussed what I needed to improve on, mainly my tendency to be too wordy. I have addressed these issues and did much better on my resubmission. Each of my teammates praised my writing abilities in every peer review they wrote for me.

Reports and proposals have always been one of my strong suits. The longer the writing, the better for me, as I have lots of ideas and my problem is always condensing. I am excellent at editing and rewriting, combining ideas from different viewpoints into one coherent thought. During work on our project proposal, I took individual pieces written by five different people, two genders and a Chinese national, and created a document that flowed smoothly and was effective in communicating our points and objectives.

My presenting skills are strong. I am comfortable in front of groups, don’t forget parts when I’m nervous, and enjoy high stress environments, which public speaking is. I was part of both our group presentations, taking a primary role in the first one and a secondary role in the second, stepping up when my team needed me to fill a role and allowing others to prove they could too since they only had one presentation to demonstrate their skills.

I have only adequate digital media skills, but it is something I am working on. I am taking courses this spring that will build on my already solid foundation so I can become expert instead of acceptable. I have a thorough understanding on keeping slides simple and to the point, getting all of our main points across to the audience without distracting them with fluff and excessive graphics. I am excellent at condensing long thoughts into a short sentence that expresses the main idea.