To:

Alana Kindness and Debbie Dilley, UCASA

From:

Alec Mittelstadt, Hayley Hadfield, Robert Williams, Kira Klubnikin, Casey Koldewyn

Date:

March 10, 2015

Subject: Survival Booklet Revision Proposal

Introduction:
As part of our Professional Writing class this semester at the University of Utah, weve been given the unique
opportunity to offer our writing services to a local non-profit organization. One of our group members, Hayley
Hadfield, contacted your organization in order to offer our services. We received a brief response indicating your
organization would appreciate assistance in revising your You Are a Survivor booklet to increase accessibility by
making it easier to both read and reproduce.
Background:
You have identified several difficulties with your organization's current survivor booklet, and due to your status as a
nonprofit organization we understand that finding time and resources to make the necessary modifications can be
difficult; therefore, we would like to help you free of charge. We know that you are a statewide organization, and we
hope to be able to help you help those who may be near and dear to us.
Proposal Description:
Our primary emphasis for this revision is the text itself, rather than layout or design. After reviewing the current
booklet, we propose to make the following modifications:
Simplify the text to prioritize readability
Simplify word choice to empower readers with limited vocabularies
Isolate the text in a non-proprietary file format (such as a text or html file) so that the possibility exists for
converting it to other formats (such as pdf, ebook, print, etc.) easily.
Needs:
You have identified several difficulties with your organizations current survivor booklet. You have requested we
revise it in order to make it more understandable to those who may not use English as their primary language or
those who have developmental disabilities.We hope to simplify the presentation of the information so that those who
are not fluent in English can still gain something from the material. We understand that your organization likely
works with individuals from many diverse backgrounds and requires resources which can be utilized by as many of
them as possible.
In addition, we have identified that in its present format, this booklet is difficult to reproduce economically on the
standard printers most people have access to. The color schemes and backgrounds in the survivor booklet are
beautiful when viewed online or when professionally printed. However, people who wish to print this out at home
on their smaller printers may have trouble printing the color heavy pages.
Methods:
In order to best help you with this project, we will review common practices for making documents user-friendly.
We intend to examine documents, which are already known for their ease-of-use in order to identify the key
strategies employed, which we will then utilize in our revision. We will research the most common words
understood by non-native English speakers to best summarize the text with everyday language. Once our project is
mostly complete, we will ensure that our work will be effective by soliciting feedback from third-parties.
Schedule:
Date:

Objective:

February 24 - March 3

Review existing document and determine specific details of the revision effort.

March 3 - March 26

Begin revision process.

March 26

Complete Survival Booklet Revisions and send to UCASA for confirmation.

March 26 - April 7

Make final edits.

April 23

Submit completed work to UCASA.

Qualifications:
All group members are currently enrolled in Writing 3015 - Professional Writing. In addition, some members are
specifically completing degrees within the Universitys Writing Department. We are all familiar with computers and
document design.
Budget:
Our group is here to help revise and edit the original survivor booklet into a new more easily readable version. We
might print out a few copies to make sure that the final product will be satisfactory, but we wont be printing any
more than necessary for the editing and revision process. It is up to UCASA to determine how to format and
reproduce the text for final distribution.
Conclusion:
We are excited to begin working on this project and we are grateful for the opportunity to work with you. After this
project is done, we are sure you will be extremely pleased with the results.