Business correspondence a guide to everyday writing pdf

business correspondence a guide to everyday writing pdf

Business Correspondence Project

For this project, you will assume three different roles for three pieces of correspondence. Each piece of correspondence will require you to respond to situations that you might encounter in a workplace situation: responding to a customer complaint, registering a formal business complaint, and writing an informational memo to company employees. To guide your work, you will draw from the readings in the course textbook Successful Writing at Work by Philip C. Kolin (especially Chapters 3 & 4) as well as our class discussions and employ rhetorical strategies that are responsive to the communication demands in this business setting. For both your rough drafts and final drafts of this project, you will turn in a single document (either as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf). You will compose the letter, memo, and flier in response to their specific prompt listed below. Remember you will be graded on tone, audience awareness, appropriate formatting for each genre, design, organization of information, and appropriateness of included information (avoid including “fluff”).

Assignment Goals: ● Students will be able to identify genres of business communication. ● Students will become adept at understanding the rhetorical situation of business

communication and be able to create documents that anticipate the needs of their readers. ● Students will learn basic design principles for document design

Grade Breakdown:

Business Correspondence

Deliverables Points Memorandum 25 Business Letter 25

Flier 25 Rough Drafts of all three 25

Total 100

Scenarios

Business Letter SCENE: You work as a sales representative for Too Good Tents, a long-time supplier of pop up tents for Daniel’s Sporting Goods. Daniel’s Sporting Goods just hired a new purchasing manager who has sent you a complaint letter about the pricing of tents. The price of their pop up tents had increased by 10% on their last invoice. Although some of your other accounts saw increased pricing, you worked out a deal with the previous purchasing manager of Daniel’s Sporting Goods to keep the same cost on the tents due to their long history with the company and their high volume of tent sales. Somewhere along the line, the billing department missed this and sent Daniel’s Sporting Goods an invoice with the increased price. You need to write a response letter to the purchasing manager, Miranda McGinty, at Daniel’s Sporting Goods to let her know that the price increase was a mistake.

Memorandum SCENE: You are a manager at Daniel’s Sporting Goods. There was a recent change in your pop up tent stock. Now, Too Good Tents will be the primary brand of pop up tents that you will carry even though Pretty Tents pop up tents have also been very popular with customers. The reason for this stock change is an increase in the pricing of Pretty Tents; since the purchasing manager negotiated a lower price with Too Good Tents, Daniel’s will be increasing the variety of Too Good Tents that it sells. You need to write a memo to your employees that informs them of this change. Customers might be resistant to this change, so you should address that concern as well. Only management has work e-mails at Daniel’s Sporting goods, so you will need to create a paper memo to hand out to each of them.

Flier SCENE: You work at Daniel’s Sporting Goods and were asked by the manager to create a flier for a sale on Pretty Tents pop up tents. This is a clearance sale to move the last of the Pretty Tents stock since Too Good Tents are going to be the only brand of pop up tents Daniel’s Sporting Goods carries moving forward even though Pretty Tents is still a popular brand. Currently, you have two kinds of Pretty Tents pop up tents: 2 person and 4 person. 2 person tents are usually $99.95, and four person tents are usually $189.99 before tax. The manager told you that Pretty Tents pop up tents will be sold at a 35% discount during the clearance sale, and that if anyone purchases a Pretty Tents pop up tent, they will also be eligible to purchase a 25 oz steel insulated thermos for only $15 instead of the usual $25.99.