Claim Letter & Solicitation Email Assignment

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is to give you practice using formats you will encounter as a workplace communicator. This assignment requires that you respond appropriately to the scenarios described below. Keep in mind your audience and purpose when you establish the tone of your responses.

Deliverables (3)

1. Claim letter

For this assignment, you need to write about an experience that has provided you with an arguable claim or complaint. Your job is to document a problem you have had with a product, person, situation, or service, and show specifically that you deserve compensation or action.

Write a claim letter to a person in the organization who can help you, and request a specific action to resolve the claim. Your letter should be fairly detailed concerning the experience you're writing about. Don’t forget to be polite and reasonable; you must convince your reader that you are justifiably unsatisfied.

2. Solicitation email

As the recruitment director for your organization (e.g., university, community nonprofit group, sorority, student service organization) you have been charged with the task of increasing membership by 50% this year. Your job is to target prospective members and sell them on not only joining the organization but also becoming active participants.

Write a solicitation email to a member of your targeted audience explaining the benefits of participating in your organization, this organization's values to the community, and the types of activities in which your targeted audience would participate as members. Keep in mind that your audience consists of busy people who must be sold on the idea and who receive a lot of spam.

Do not include the To, From, or Date lines, but do include a Subject line. Write it so that the reader will not treat the email as spam.

3. Reflective Memo

A 400-600 word reflective memo, addressed to the instructor, in which you:

• summarize your processes of writing the claim letter and solicitation email;
• summarize your analysis of the audiences for both documents;
• analyze the different rhetorical approach required by each document;
• describe which of the course goals (see the course website home page) you feel you encountered in completing this assignment, and explain your answer.

Grading Criteria

Before submitting your deliverables, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do my documents show awareness to audience and purpose?
• Are my documents an appropriate length?
• Do my first paragraphs set up the purposes, issues, and contexts?
• Do I use details to justify my claims/requests?
• Do my concluding paragraphs contain calls to action?
• Is my language clear and direct?
• Is my document design good (including typography, color and white space)?
• Are my documents free of grammatical