Informal proposal

Business and

Technical Writing

FINAL EXAM:

AN INFORMAL PROPOSAL

Purpose

Your final project for the Business and Technical Writing

course is worth 30% of your course grade and requires you

to write an informal proposal in letter form. Your work must

be your own.

Important: Don’t submit your final draft for this project until

you’ve received the evaluations of all your previous written

exams, so you can make use of the evaluator’s comments to

improve your final project.

Preparation

Before you begin this project, review pages 8–16 in Proposals

and Special Projects, which is related to writing informal,

internal proposals. Also study the differences between

proposals and reports (like your field investigation report).

Figure 3 shows the general style and basic format you’ll

use for this final exam. Also review the formatting for a fullblock

style business letter, covered in Writing Effective

Communications. Review the explanation provided in each

study unit related to writing style, tone, audience, word

choice, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Gather the brainstorming, freewriting, and graded exams

you’ve already prepared for previous assignments about

Phoenix Advertising. You’ll build on some of the details you

developed and incorporate suggestions from the instructors

evaluating your previous work. You’ll also have to brainstorm

further in order to create facts, figures, names,

numbers, analysis, and proof to support your plan of

action in your proposal.

2 Business and Technical Writing

Background Information

Here’s a brief review of the scenario; also review the full

information provided in the exam section of Organizing,

Illustrating, and Researching Your Material. Phoenix

Advertising, with its main headquarters in Charlotte, North

Carolina, serves clients that include banks, insurance companies,

and retail chains. You’re vice president of human

resources management at Phoenix. You report directly to

Gregory S. Forest, the company president.

You’ve already investigated the branch and provided a report on

the problems there and your recommendations for managing

them (for study units Organizing, Researching, and Illustrating

Your Material and Writing the Report). Mr. Forest has reviewed

that report and now wants you to present to the executive team

a specific proposal developing one of the recommendations you

gave. Following are the primary problems covered in the

scenario but also carefully review the underlying causes you

discovered in your investigation (which you created from

your imagination).

In the last three months, two of the top management people—

an art director and an account executive—have left the branch.

Each left for a position with a competing agency.

Three of the graphic designers and four of the copywriters

are threatening to quit because they feel their creative efforts

are being rejected or revised without consultation. They want

to be part of a collaborative team, not produce work that the

art directors and account executives evaluate arbitrarily.

In an attempt to show increased profitability, the branch

is accepting all potential clients without evaluating the

accounts in terms of current project workload. As a result,

without being given any notice and without compensation for

the additional hours, all employees are working long hours

several days each week. Employee morale and productivity

seem to be decreasing with each passing day.

Final Examination 3

Process

Step 1

Choose one of the problems. Use your brainstorming notes

and the investigative report for the recommendations you

listed to solve that problem. Brainstorm further about the

reasons for and causes of that one problem by delving even

further into the “whys” of that problem. As you did previously,

list several questions and review the answers you’ve discovered.