- Maker: Jamie Heising
- Genre: Proposal – Business Plan
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5400: Technical Writing
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Fall 2025
Description
When deciding what to do for Project 5, something that I thought of was doing something that I could use in the future. I’ve considered running a tutoring business in the past because I think it would help a lot of people. I decided to do a business/communication plan, and I would focus on certain elements like fees and services and how I would interact with clients. I also went into detail about the age group of the students I would tutor and whether I would be the sole owner/worker of the business, I also designed my own logo and flyer. I wanted to make this plan feel realistic, and something I could potentially use down the road. This plan should hopefully not only help me, but other people who might want to start a business of their own.
Reflection
I found this project extremely helpful because it helped me to lay the groundwork for a business I want to create in the future. When I do ultimately create this business, it helps that I already have everything figured out. This project allowed me to be creative in a different way then I ever have. Creating a business/communication plan isn’t something I normally do on a daily basis, so having to use my brain in a different way was challenging, but rewarding in the end. When I was making this, I tried thinking about if it was usable to other people. In Jason Chew Kit Tham’s article he mentions design thinking, saying “The empathy mode in design thinking refers to perceiving problems from the perspectives of actual users, rather than the designer’s or commercial point of view” (394). The idea of empathy Tham talks about is important because when something isn’t digestible to an audience, you lose them. I wanted to make sure that this business plan could be used by me, but also other people. I wanted it to be understandable from multiple points of views. This process differed from other writing experiences because I’ve never accounted for certain things that are involved in a business plan, like costs of services and business layout. It was never something I’d ever learned to account for before, so having to do it here was a little bit challenging. I think what I was most satisfied with is how realistic this plan was, especially since I’ve never written one before, it looks like something you’d maybe see in an actual business/communication plan. Something that I feel like I could’ve worked on was widening some areas of my plan. I talk about a lot of different things in the plan and maybe I should’ve focused on certain things rather than others that I did focus on more. In Mari Ramler’s article, it’s discussed how technical communication has many different layers, saying “[N]ot all realize that while technical communication is a practice…typography, and cultural studies” (2). When reading this line, I identified with this line when working on this project because technical communication is so vast and it has so many layers and so many moving parts that people don’t even realize sometimes. There were so many moving parts to this project, not only just writing wise, but also visually.
