Hi everyone,
Here’s your individual assignment on email writing.
This assignment carries 10% of the total that’ll contribute to your final grading.
Given below are two scenarios.
Your assignment: You have to write two emails – one for each scenario.
Scenario 1:
Walter Joss is one of the best employees in your department, a smart and hard worker with a keen
mind for business. His upbeat attitude has helped the entire department get through some recent
rough times, and on a personal level, his wise counsel helped you grow into a leadership role when
you were promoted to marketing manager several years ago.
You generally welcome Joss’s input on the department’s operations, and you have implemented
several of his ideas to improve the company’s marketing efforts. However, the proposal he emailed
you yesterday was not his best work, to put it mildly. He proposed that the company dump the
advertising agency it has used for a decade and replace it with some new agency you’ve never heard
of. The only reasons he offered were that the agency “had become non-responsive” and that a
“smaller agency could meet our needs better.” He failed to address any of the other criteria that are
used to select advertising agencies, such as costs, creative skills, technical abilities, geographic reach,
research capabilities, and media experience.
This is the first you’ve heard any criticism of the agency, and in fact, their work has helped your
company increase sales every year.
Your task: Draft an email message to Joss, rejecting his proposal. Use the SCRAP framework. You
have to reject Joss’s proposal. Please don’t ask him to rework the proposal for consideration.
Scenario 2:
As someone who came of age in the “post email” world of blogs, wikis, social networks, and other
Web 2.0 technologies, you were rather disappointed to find your new employer solidly stuck in the
age of email. You use email, of course, but it is only one of the tools in your communication toolbox.
From your college years, you have hands-on experience with a wide range of social media tools,
having used them to collaborate on school projects, to become involved in your local community, to
learn more about various industries and professions, and to research potential employees during
your job search. (In fact, without social media, you might never have heard about your current
employer in the first place.) Moreover, your use of social media on the job has already paid several
important dividends, including finding potential sales contacts at several large companies,
connecting with peers in other companies to share ideas for working more efficiently, and learning
about some upcoming legislative matters in your state that could profoundly hamper your
company’s current way of doing business.
You hoped that by setting an example through your own use of social media at work, your new
colleagues and company management would quickly adopt these tools as well. However, just the
opposite has happened. Waiting in your email in-box this morning was a message from the CEO,
announcing that the company is now cutting off access to social networking websites and banning
the use of any social media at work. The message says using company time and company computers
for socializing is highly inappropriate and might be considered grounds for dismissal in the future if
the problem gets out of hand.
Your task: You are stunned by the message. You fight the urge to fire off a hotly worded reply to
straighten out the CEO’s misperceptions. Instead, you wisely decide to send a message to your
immediate superior first, explaining why you believe the new policy should be reversed. Using your
boss’s favorite medium (email, of course!), write a persuasive message explaining why Facebook,
Twitter, and other social networking technologies are valid-and valuable- business tools. Bolster your
argument with examples from other companies and advice from communication experts.
Use the AIDA framework.
Evaluation Criteria for both emails
Your emails must include the elements of business writing and the structure of emails. You will be
evaluated on the following criteria:
1. Subject Line
2. Tone
3. Content – Use of AIDA/SCRAP
4. Language – Correctness, Clarity, Conciseness, Courtesy
5. Structure – Coherence, flow, sequencing
6. Salutation and sign off
You may enrich your submission with additional (fictional) data or information as per need.
Instructions
It is one assignment, so please put both emails in one single Word Document marking them as Email
for Scenario 1 and Email for Scenario 2. It has to be a Word Document, so we can comment and
point out errors easily.
Name your File – Full Name # _______
Submission Method: You know…
Submission Deadline: 8.00 am Friday 2nd September 2022
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