Business Communications Assignment
Purpose: As business professionals, we are not only often required to communicate with a variety of constituencies from a variety of backgrounds but we are also required to communicate to and for a variety of purposes and goals. This communication takes place within often strictly defined formats. The purpose of this assignment is, thus, to have you practice writing, editing, and revising some of the more common sorts of communications that take place in the professional business world.
In order to succeed at this assignment, you will be required to think through and incorporate what we have spent the last classes discussing: the nature of your audience and its expectations, the purposes of each writing project, the often agonistic relationship between writer and reader, and the expectations for tone, style, and voice.
The Task:
Your assignment will consist of THREE separate documents, each of which can be NO LONGER THAN ONE PAGE.
The first document you will produce is a formal business letter to an audience that you described in Response Paper 1. The audience can be made up of a single person or a group or a general population - so long as it is a population that you would realistically be communicating with. The purpose of this letter must be to persuade that audience of something. This "something" can be anything that needs persuasion - it can, for instance, be a letter to customers or vendors persuading them to buy a product, or a letter to a supervisor persuading her to increase your salary, or a letter to a committee persuading it to hire you for a position.
The second document will also be a formal business letter written to an audience from your Response Paper 1 - it cannot be the same audience as in the first letter, however. The purpose of this letter is to inform the recipient audience of some undesirable news. Examples for this letter might include things like a lost client or revenue stream, the cancellation of an event, the termination of employment, and so on. The point here is that you will be focusing on and anticipating the agonistic nature of your audience - this is news they don't want to hear and you must anticipate and account for this attitude.
The third document will be an intra-office or intra-company memorandum the purpose of which is to inform toward a decision. You can, for example, inform fellow employees of a choice between new policies to be implemented and the results of each, or you can inform a marketing team about relevant regional conditions so the team can decide where to advertise, or you could inform senior staff about the state of a project or plan that requires a decision before moving forward. This memo must transmit this information in a way that is clear and concise even as it captures everything that is important and relevant toward making the decision.
All three of these documents must be formatted as actual letters and memos.
See Better Business Writing for some examples.
Please include: In a short cover page, please describe the following for each communication:
- The audience for the communication.
- The purpose of the communication.
- The expected or hoped-for result of the communication.
For each of these items, please be as specific as possible. This cover page is informal; I'll simply use it to orient and guide my reading of the communications by, for instance, seeing if your tone matches your audience and if all your sentences promote your purpose (and so on).
Attachment:- Assignment Files.rar