English 304.2
Project 2—Business Messages
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Monday, September 25—discuss guidelines for Project 2
Wednesday, October 4—draft of Message 1 due
Monday, October 9—draft of all messages due
Wednesday, October 11—final draft of Project 2 due (note date is different than the syllabus)
For this assignment, you will be asked to compose four different business messages appropriate to specific audiences and situations. Based on your reading about the business writing process and the specific types of business correspondence, you will need to compose routine, positive, negative, and persuasive messages. You will receive specific instructions and guidelines for each message (see attached), and your finished product should respond accordingly to each situation.
Successfully written business messages will meet the following criteria:
| It should be clear you have completed all stages of the business writing process (planning, writing, and completing); |
| Please note the specific genre of each business message (blog, e-mail, letter, etc.). This genre will affect your writing style, tone, language, and formatting; |
| Tone, language, and style should be appropriate to the specific message and audience; |
| Emphasis will also be placed on structure and organization. Think carefully about the composition of your messages; |
| In two of the messages, you will need to come up with details specific to your own career or situation. These should be evident in your correspondence; |
| In the other two messages, quite a bit of information is given. It will be part of your task to sort through that information and determine what needs to be included or referenced in the messages; |
| Careful consideration should be given to proofreading and editing your messages. There will be significant grade deductions for grammar, spelling, punctuation, formatting, typographical, and style errors; |
| Please place each message on its own sheet of paper. Do not place multiple messages on the same sheet; |
| You should not need to consult any sources for this assignment but, if you do, please reference or cite them accordingly; |
| For additional guidance, please refer to the reading and notes for Chapters 4-9 in Excellence in Business Communication; |
| On Monday, October 9, we will have a draft workshop for these messages. Not having a draft on this date will result in a full grade deduction; |
| Though we will be workshopping these drafts, remember that this is not a collaborative project. The content, writing style, and organization should be unique to your messages; |
| The final draft of this assignment will be due on Wednesday, October 11. On this day, you will need to turn in your planning, drafts, peer-reviewed drafts, and final draft of each message. No late work will be accepted. |
After three years at work in your chosen career at __________________________(please add in the details here), you were laid off due to budget cuts. You have been working temporarily at Best Buy for six months and, while you are grateful for that job, you are anxious to get back to what you love doing. As such, you are on the job market again and in need of a recommendation.
Your task: Write a letter to your former boss, Jennifer Bradshaw, reminding her of the time you worked together and asking for a letter of recommendation. (You will need to tailor this message to your career and add in any details as necessary.)
You and your staff in the public relations (PR) department at Epson of America were delighted when the communication campaign you created for the new PictureMate Personal Photo Lab (www.epson.com/picturemate) was awarded the prestigious Silver Anvil award by the Public Relations Society of America. Now you’d like to give your team a pat on the back by sharing the news with the rest of the company.
Your task: Write a one-paragraph message for the PR department blog (which is read by people throughout the company but is not accessible outside the company) announcing the award. Take care not to “toot your own horn” as the manager of the PR department and use the opportunity to compliment the rest of the company for designing and producing such and innovative product.
Message 3—Negative Message
A not-so-secret is getting more attention than you’d really like after an article in BusinessWeek gave the world an inside look at how much money you and other electronics retailers make from extended warranties (sometimes called service contracts). The article explained that typically half of the warranty price goes to the salesperson as a commission and that only 20 percent of the total amount customers pay for warranties eventually goes to product repair.
You also know why extended warranties are such a profitable business. Many electronics products follow a predictable pattern of failure: a high failure rate early in their lives, then a “midlife” period during which failures go way down, and concluding with an “old age” period when failure rates ramp back up again (engineers refer to the phenomenon as the bathtub curve because it looks like a bathtub from the side—high at both ends and low in the middle). Those early failures are usually covered by manufacturers’ warranties, and the extended warranties you sell are designed to cover that middle part of the life span. In other words, many extended warranties cover the period of time during which consumers are least likely to need them and offer no coverage when consumers need them most. (Consumers can actually benefit from extended warranties in a few product categories, including laptop computers and plasma TVs. Of course, the more sense the warranty makes for the consumer, the less financial sense it makes for your company).
Your task: Worried that consumers will start buying fewer extended warranties, your boss has directed you to put together a sales training program that will help cashiers sell the extended warranties even more aggressively. The more you ponder this challenge, though, the more you’re convinced that your company should change its strategy so it doesn’t rely on profits from these warranties so much. In addition to offering questionable value to the consumer, they risk creating a consumer backlash that could lead to lower sales of all your products. You would prefer to voice your concerns to your boss in person, but both of you are traveling on hectic schedules for the next week. You’ll have to write an e-mail instead. Draft a brief message explaining why you think the sales training specifically and the warranties in general are both bad ideas.
Making a Change at North Carolina Wesleyan: Persuasive Letter
As we all know, North Carolina Wesleyan College offers a lot of opportunities and benefits to faculty, staff, and students. That said, there are issues at every college that could use improvement or attention. For this message, think of a problem or issue at North Carolina Wesleyan College that you think needs to be resolved or improved upon. This can be an issue specific to you or it can be a problem that affects a larger group of people on campus.
Your task: Write a persuasive letter to the appropriate college official (a staff member, administrator, faculty member, coach, students, etc.) outlining what you think the issue is and then persuasively suggesting a solution to this problem. This is a persuasive letter in two ways: first, you have to convince the official that the problem actually exists; then, you have to persuade him/her that your solution is practical, appropriate, and necessary. Remember that while this is primarily a persuasive message, you are also possibly pointing out something negative, so pay attention to your writing style and tone.