Collaborative Drafting Exercise
Collaborative Drafting Exercise
The exercise helps you get started on drafting professional correspondence by giving you the opportunity to work as a group to write a practice document. Working with your team, read the scenario below. Together, discuss what genre you think the correspondence should be (i.e., email, memo, letter). Then use the questions below to do a PAD Analysis of the scenario. After you have completed the analysis, draft your correspondence as a group.
Scenario:
You are the CEO of Health Nut, Inc., a small health food manufacturer that specializes in snack foods, like trail mix and granola. Recently, the company developed a new product, Nuts About Berries, a trail mix with mixed nuts, dried berries, and carob pieces. All 80 employees at the company worked hard to develop, test, market, and distribute Nuts About Berries, but, unfortunately, the product has not performed well with consumers. The profits have not been able to cover the cost of research and development.
You have been tasked with looking at the company’s finances to figure out a way to help defer the cost of developing Nuts About Berries, and you have concluded that the least disruptive, most effective way to do that is to cancel the corporate gym membership program. However, this gym membership program has been included in the company’s benefit package going back almost to the beginning of the company, and it is very popular with employees.
Your job is to compose a correspondence to the employees explaining the decision to end the gym membership program. After you have all read the scenario, select which genre of correspondence you will write (i.e., email, memo, letter). For that correspondence, in your groups, you will complete and submit the following two things:
Pre-Writing:
Perform a PAD analysis (Purpose, Audience, and Design) of your chosen correspondence by answering the following questions:
- What’s your purpose? More than just the stated purpose? What’s the goal—the desired outcome?
- Who’s your audience? More than just a name, what’s their stake in the situation? How are they disposed toward your correspondence? Are they an internal or external audience? What’s the power dynamic between you? What level of formality do they expect? What tone is appropriate?
- What design will be most effective? Think about genre (i.e., letter or memo) and why you think this genre is appropriate. Think about style and format and length. Think about structure and organization.
Drafting:
After you have done your PAD analysis, draft the correspondence as a team.