Saving the City Auditorium
Purpose: Create a Business Proposal
Created using: Microsoft Office Suite/Adobe Acrobat
For: Business and Professional Communication Class (COMM 3240)
Effective Communication
Communicate complex ideas clearly in written, oral, and visual forms. Develop the ability to analyze rhetorical situations and adapt to specific audiences. Accept that most audiences will scan and skip most of what is written. Find alternate methods of presentation.
Context
This project was created as part of an initiative to convince the Colorado Springs City Council to reopen the City Auditorium. The City Auditorium had been shuttered since 2022 as part of a bold renovation project that had since been cancelled. There were no plans to reopen the building when I began this project. However, the reopening of the City Auditorium was announced right as I was finishing my presentation.
Analysis
This project was completed using Microsoft Word so I had
no issues in the actual document creation. Pain points
came from the lack of proper research materials.
Secondary sources were mostly newspaper articles, which
were supplemented by a few sparse synopses on the
Colorado Springs City Council page. The numbers used for
my analysis came from City Council budget documents
that were outdated. Primary sources were plentiful but had
little to add in the form of concrete information. My
attempts to interview someone at the City Council
directly were unsuccessful. However, I was able to glean a small amount of good information from existing newspaper articles.
Since the amount of information I had available was limited, I had to start looking at similar situations in different cities and compare what did or did not work for those places. This research led me to come up with three renovation plans along with two options for privatization. I was opposed to privatization, but I wanted to give every available option to the City Council to show I was unbiased.
Reflection
This assignment proved many of the concepts of technical writing. This document is very information dense, and the challenge was to use document design to make it skippable and scannable for members of the City Council who cannot be counted on to read the document in its entirety. I learned that I could apply TCID concepts to any document to make it skippable and scannable. In the future I would like to be able to implement more design features to break up information. Things like colors and typography can be presented in a manner that do not ruin the professional standards of the document.
