Assignment Reflection 2

The English 2311 Assignment number two; writing a business letter and memo, called for various situations and types of letters that were being written.

How I chose to approach Scenario #1 (effective business letter writing), where I am the manager of CompUSA and received a following letter message from a unsatisfied customer, and wrote an adjustment letter to Buck Wheat either accepting or rejecting the request. First I considered how I would feel if I were the customer and this happened to me. Then I put myself in the manager’s position. From my previous work experience I decided what would be the best outcome and that was to accept the customers complaint and send them the software. This is because the advertisement did say that the software was included. My tone approach was to sympathize with the customer and assure them that it would not happen again.

How I chose to approach Scenario #2 (effective memo writing), where I am Assistant Personnel Manager, and have been given the task of communicating Lily's displeasure to my colleagues. In addition, I was asked to come up with some kind of plan that will slow the number of personal copies made on the photocopy machine. So, I have to come up with a brief, feasible plan for curbing personal copy-making and communicate it through a 1-page memo to my colleagues. My tone was to be professional and assertive to clearly show the employees that this is a problem and needed to be fixed immediately. I wanted to give the employees all the information because I know I like to know what is going on if there is a change in my work environment.

Summarizing and reflecting on this assignments genres and how I organized my content
to target each communication situation was mainly keeping in mind my audience and purpose when I established the tone of my responses in both the business letter and memo. I felt that the memo was a little limiting in conveying my ideas but that’s why the memo is supposed to be short.

The purpose of this assignment was to give me practice in writing letters, memos, and e-mails. I will encounter these three genres frequently in the workplace. The course goals on the course website I felt I encountered in completing this assignment were analyzing communication contexts rhetorically by understanding audiences, purposes, and situations, creating technical documents that solve problems and improve situations through communication, and analyzing and applying the ethical responsibilities involved in technical communication;