Creating Effective Documents

COM140 Week 6 CheckPoint: Creating Effective Documents

Read Closely!

This course has covered various types of business communication—each with its own format and characteristics. In other college courses, you will write academic papers formatted according to guidelines in the Axia College’s Writing Style Handbook. This CheckPoint provides you with an opportunity to compare the ways business and academic writing are similar and different.

• Resources: Microsoft® Word tutorial, Designing Documents Tutorial, and Axia College’s Writing Style Handbook

• Due Date: Day 4 [Individual] forum

• Review the Microsoft® Word tutorial at

http://corptrain.phoenix.edu/office_tools/word_root.htm, the Designing Documents Tutorial at

http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/techcomm/content/cat_030/designWP/index.html, and Chapter 1 in Axia College’s Writing Style Handbook.

• Address the following in 200-300 words: Suggest two tips for creating academic documents not mentioned in the resource information. Which guidelines do you think are most important for formatting papers? Which guidelines appear less important to the

message of a business document but more important to the message of an academic paper? Explain your answers.

• Post the CheckPoint.

Summation

1.  Write an essay (200-300) words; in it:

a.  Suggest 2 tips for creating academic documents that are not listed in the resource information, Microsoft® Word tutorial, Designing Documents Tutorial, and Axia College’s Writing Style Handbook.

b.  Answer the questions: which guidelines are the most important?

c.   Which guidelines appear less important to a business document than to an academic paper?

d.  Explain both answers.

2.  Use the Rubric as a checklist to make certain the assignment is complete.

3.  Attach to a post.

         There are a multitude of features that are excellent for creating academic documents in my Microsoft Word 2007.  Two such features I think are most helpful in creating academic documents that would be consistent with even Microsoft Word 2003 would be auto correct and inserting charts or graphs.  The auto correct feature allows the creator to assign certain common misspellings to change automatically to the correct word as you are typing your document.  Inserting of charts and graphs allow the student to include statistical information right into their documents in a more visually appealing form for greater emphasis of their research. 

        Two of the more important guidelines when formatting papers would have to be line spacing and font size and style.  Without use of these guidelines within your document it can be hard to read and look unprofessional.   A messy or unprofessional looking paper is often overlooked or under graded due to its formatting.  A nice formatted paper is more pleasant to look at, easier to read and more likely to be taken seriously. 

        There are a few guidelines that are more important to an academic paper than a business document, proper citations and references are two such guidelines.  Since academic papers usually include research of some kind, where you got your information needs to be cited and referenced properly at the end of your document.  Not all business documents are for such purposes and need no citations or references.