Speech Outline

Greeting

By show of hands how many of you own cellphones? Now, how many of you drive? Have any of you ever used your phone while driving? You don't have to answer that one with a show of hands but just think. I believe everyone has been in a car at least once when the person who is driving is also on their phone. It might have only been for a couple of seconds.

Thesis statement

AT&T is a cellphone company that provides cell service like any other company but with this commercial they in my eyes stood out more. In this commercial they didn't talk about the newest phone being released, but demonstrated something even more important. In this commercial AT&T went out of their way and decided to be different from all the other cellular providers and showed us the importance of paying attention while behind the wheel. A thing that many of us have forgotten to do since the invention of the cellphone.

Overview: Rhetorical Strategies:

-Context & Audience: To get people to stop using their phones while driving, for anyone who drives or has a phone that can encourage others to not use it while driving.
-Setting: A town that that connects all of these people to this one scenario.

Main Idea 1

The use of tragedy to show the lives of the ones impacted by the scene.

Main Idea 2

The use of Pathos in this commercial because it evokes sadness. It is a commercial that tells a story and brings the emotion of sadness.

Main Idea 3

Talk about the awareness drivers need to have while behind the wheel.

Main Idea 4

The aftermath of it all and who these accidents can affect

Conclusion

Summary

As stated in the previous main points, by the actions that occurred in this advertisement, many of the things you do behind the wheel can affect those around you as well.

Thesis Statement

While watching this advertisement for AT&T "Close to Home | It can wait" commercial it made me realize that our society is becoming so attached to our phones that we don't even think about our safety or the safety of others while driving. Although this commercial had a lot of seriousness, I believe it wasn't the kind that bored away the audience but one that got their attention instead.

Closer

The main purpose for this commercial was not to advertise and say that this company provided the best service, it was an eye opening commercial that company might think it could help minimize the usage of cellular devices behind the wheel since they sell those cellular devices themselves. By doing this they want to make the roads safer for everyone in and outside of their vehicles.

Speech Proposal

The company for the commercial I have chosen is AT&T. I chose this commercial because I thought it would be important for everyone to know the dangers of being on your phone while you are driving. I thought it was pretty interesting how they used the use of tragedy to change peoples minds about using their phones while driving. I want to know if this commercial will influence people to wait till they get to their destination to check their phones. I do believe that this commercial has changed the perspective people have about using their phones while operating a vehicle.
My tentative thesis is that this advertisement will make a difference on how many people use their phones while driving. I feel as though it is a tragic commercial and I feel that more people will wait to be on their phones until they have reached their destination due to the tragedies that this commercial showed. The evidence I plan to use would be to look up the statistics on how many accidents were caused by those who use their phones in the past couple years here in the united states and also here in Iowa.
The visual aids I could use would be pictures of different car accidents caused by people who are on their mobile devices. I could also use charts and graphs of the amount of recorded accidents as well.

Commercial Analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVnRcIXEqaU

The commercial that I chose to analyze for this assignment, is the AT&T Close to Home| It Can Wait commercial. It is a commercial that involves the lives of many different people. It starts off with a little boy counting cars and riding his bike, then switches off to a mother and daughter leaving home to run some errands. It also includes a man who had just been on the phone with his wife. Also includes a Latina who is taking care of an older man and she decides to go outside and water the plants. The Audience that this is aimed toward would be pretty much anyone with a cellphone.
I believe that the general purpose of this commercial is to get people more aware of the seriousness of being on your phone while driving. This commercial is also trying to show that texting and driving not only affects you but also those around you as well. I think AT&T did a good job with this commercial, and was able to change the perspective of people who use their phone while driving. This commercials main component is tragedy because it shows how it can affect the lives of those around you when you get into a car accident.

Improvements

I really think the peer reviews were very helpful but at some moments I felt like they were being too nice. Like they only had good things to say and not much about what to fix. I know my paper wasn't the best and I wish everyone would be more open with telling me what I needed to fix more than what I didn't need to fix. Although it does help to know what I should keep I do believe that they need to be a little more tough with their criticism.
The meetings that we had with you were also very helpful when improving my paper since I didn't get a whole lot of criticism on some things or maybe they had just been forgotten. How ever since the meetings were running late I had felt like everything seemed very rushed. Maybe the next time around the meetings can be longer or run more on time and have little breaks between then just in case they do go over time a bit. Something that can also be fixed the next time around would be to have a list of the things I need to fix in my paper before hand that way the meeting runs more smoothly because I honestly don't know what I should fix in my own papers.

More than just numbers

More than just numbers

            When most people think about accounting, the first thing that comes to mind is all of the numbers. But what most people don’t realize is that there is actually a lot of writing involved in this career as well. Not only is it very important for accountants to be good at math but they also have to be good at writing and explain things in good detail as well.

As said in an article written by DePaul, it is very important for accountants to be able to communicate with clients and co-workers as well. In other words, accounting is characterized by clarity and conciseness so that the reader is able to understand. Writing in accounting includes argumentative and analytical pieces and not just descriptive words. If you think accounting is your escape from writing you might want to think about it again as explained by Gabriele Lingenfelter (2010):

            Frequently, our students do not realize that written communication skills are essential to the accounting profession. As a matter of fact, communication skills are one of the five core competencies outlined in the CPA Vision Project, tested on the CPA Exam and demanded by employers.

Writing is not only important in this field but many other fields as well. You will not be able to escape writing in almost any career of study that you may wish to pursue. Although you may be able to find one that has less writing than others.

            From the academic and non-academic sources I have noticed that there are certain elements that are important in the writing for accounting. For example, one must be aware of the audience that they are trying to communicate with. The audience definitely has an impact on the tone that you must portray. For some you might have to write more formally than others. Some examples of this would be an email between you and a co-worker or to a client. Those would have to be two different tones, also depending on if you know the person in a more personal level or not.

Another important element for writing in accounting would be writing with a clear purpose and clarity. For example, when you are writing with a clear purpose, you have to make sure your audience understands what you are trying to say. Also tying along with that would be the clarity of the writing as well. It needs to be clear and easy to understand. Again depending on the reader and if they know a lot or very little about accounting in general.

            For my interview I chose someone that works in the same place as me and that would be for the University of Iowa’s parking and transportation. There are a few accountants that work there and the one that I had interviewed had been working there they were in college and ended up staying there to work as an accountant and has now been working there as an accountant for about 5 years now. They said they actually spend a lot of time writing and estimate about 4 or 5 hours doing just that at work.

As an accountant you will be expected to write in different ways. Really common types of writing that were named by DePaul and a source that that was titled the writing center were reports, e-mails, memos, papers and letters. Accountants often write letters to their clients, co-workers and also the government. These letters allow you to build relationships, make recommendations, and take certain actions. Emails are mostly more commonly used in the business world as I was also told by the person I interviewed as well. They are used a lot to communicate with other people in the same business, clients, and other businesses as well. They can either be a formal or an informal letter that introduces procedures, conclusions, etc. Papers are also something that accountants have to write every once in a while as well. They require a summary and analysis of papers. Viewing someone’s argument and seeing its importance.

There are different types of papers an accountant can write and those are opinion papers and research papers as well. Opinion papers describe your opinion/position on certain ideas/subjects. While research papers are based more off of evidence that you find in your investigations. For my interviewee the most difficult document they had to write was the reports. For reports because they have to analyze the parking passes and make sure things are going the way they should be and nothing is missing from that because a lot of the cashiers forget to mention that they reduced the rate of someone’s parking for some reason. For someone who has always thought of accounting as an escape from writing, with this assignment I realized that it was not the case.

Not only are there non-academic ways of writing for this profession but there are also academic forms of writing as well. This expressed by those in this field writing to each other. Information for this type of writing is often in a more academic way by presenting their information with graphs, pie charts, and the formulas which they use to show their work. The audience in this form of writing is also more limited. In academic writing you would be writing to other accountant, whereas in non-academic you would be writing to your clients.

In writing there will always be for many purposes and audiences, some that are more formal than others as well. Whether it may be an email, report, or a memo for the forms of non-academic writing. But also the more formal types of writing as well which comes to play in the more academic aspect of it, which would be the graphs, charts, etc. that are used to prove others of your work and findings. Although this field seems like more of a mathematical field with no writing included, writing takes a huge part in this field. So next time you might want to consider escaping writing, you might want to think twice about that because it’s going to be a lot harder than you may think.

References

University Center for Writing-based Learning. (n.d.). Retrieved February 08, 2016

Writing in Accounting and Finance. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.umt.edu/writingcenter/docs/Writing in Accounting and Finance.pdf

Lingenfelter, G. (2010). Improving accounting students' writing skills. Retrieved February 09, 2016, from http://www.accountingweb.com/aa/auditing/improving-accounting-students-writing-skills

Interview/Sources

Alexis Lugo

2/4/2016

Interview/Sources

I have not completed my interview just yet because I am suppose to have it in the afternoon on the 4th. Here are some questions that I will be asking the person I am interviewing though. Like what made them interested in pursuing this career? If they had any jobs before that might have influenced them into pursuing this career? How many years they have worked in this career? How much time they spend writing in a day? ·          What is the most common writing activity you perform?  Who reads this?  What do you have to consider as you write this genre?  Have you ever read a particularly good or bad example of this type of writing?  What made it good or bad?

The sources that I have found, I found them through the University of Iowa library website. It’s been pretty complicated because there aren’t many sources that talk about the writing for accountants. But the sources that I have found are a lot about the important things accounting students should know. There are also other articles about how accounting teachers/professors could be better at what they are teaching. There are also some sources that explain how students can enhance their interpersonal skills. A lot of these sources have a bunch of charts explaining the growth and stuff on their businesses.

Analysis #4

In my previous papers that I have written for classes, I have noticed that I have quoted my sources. When I quoted I wrote the name of the author writes about and then the name of the article to begin the sentence and then I put in the quote. It explains the evidence that I found in this reading for a paper that I was writing for my intro to criminal justice class. It relates to my text because we were reading about the judiciary branch.