Persuasive Letter Packet

Assignment: Professional Letter Packet

ENG 3100, Fall 2016
August 30, 2016
Overview
Routine business communication a huge part of most careers, and while email has moved most of this
correspondence online, there are still many occasions when a physical letter might be more appropriate for your
purpose. In addition to completing important work for an organization or corporation, correspondence through
formal letters also influences the ethos (the credibility) of both you and the parties you represent. In this
assignment you will be completing two scenarios that call for two very different kinds of response.
Your Task
For this project, you will be receiving two detailed writing prompts that each describe a particular situation. One
of those prompts will call upon you to compose a bad news letter based on our readings from Chapter 11. The
other will ask you compose a persuasive letter based upon the AIDA format we study in Chapter 12. Each of the
prompts will provide you with some basic information about your audience and your role as a communicator,
and while the format of the professional business letter will carry across each task, the way in which you present
and structure your letters should differ quite a bit across each letter. The end of goal of this assignment is to
make you more familiar with the conventions of professional business letters and to grant you an opportunity to
experiment with the genre for different audiences and purposes.
To succeed you will need to:
Thoroughly analyze your audience and purpose to make sure that you understand what your task is for
each of the letters.
Carefully reflect upon the strategies necessary for each kind of letter (bad news vs. persuasive) and
effectively construct a message that achieves your goal.
Thoroughly consider and apply the concepts weve covered in Chapters 11 and 12, including the AIDA
format.
Submit a reflective memo in which you discuss your explicit reasoning for the choices you made in
constructing your letters; including a description of your audience and your goals.
Make use of the Block Letter format (found on page 577-578, see Figure A.3)
Reflective Memo (one page)
In this memo, you will be responsible for describing your thought processes for each of the letters you are
composing. As a result, you will need to separately (potentially using multiple headings) provide a description of
your understanding of the audience and purpose. Along with that, you should explicitly discuss the rhetorical
choices you made in order to create an effective piece of business correspondence.
Format (Persuasive Letter)
Use block letter format, page 578 Figure A.3
Should be longer than 1 page . Limit to no more than 2 pages in length. A second page should also
include a second page heading.
Format the letter in size 12 Times New Roman
Create a letterhead as this is a business letter from you to another company. Letterhead includes company
name and contact information; a logo is optional.
Follow AIDA
Send an enclosure, use enclosure notation, and correctly and effectively direct your readers attention to
the enclosure in the body of the letter.
Format (Bad News Letter)
Use modified block letter format, page 579 Figure A.4
Limit to one page

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Format the letter in size 12 Times New Roman

Create a letterhead as this is a business letter from you to another company. Letterhead includes company
name and contact information; a logo is optional.
Include a positive ending for its last paragraph.
Do not send an enclosure nor use enclosure notation.

TL;DR
Read through the two scenarios in this prompt.
Compose a professional business letter that responds to each.
Submit a Reflective Memo with the Final Draft.
Due Dates
Draft One:
Final Draft:
Portfolio Draft:

Tuesday, September 6
Tuesday, September 13
Due with ePortfolio; Wednesday, August 3 by midnight

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Bad News Letter Scenario

Create a letter using the indirect (buffer) approach to reject Roseway Manufacturings bid to supply
faucets to Home Depot.
No Deal: Letter from Home Depot to faucet manufacturer. As assistant to the vice president of sales for
Atlanta-based Home Depot, you attended Home Depots biannual product-line review held at Tropicana
Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. Also attending were hundreds of vendor hopefuls, each eager to become
one of the huge retail chains 25,000 North American suppliers. During individual meetings with a panel
of regional and national Home Depot merchandisers, these vendors did their best to win, keep, or expand
their spot in the companys product lineup.
Vendors know that Home Depot holds all the cards; so, if they want to play, they have to follow Home
Depot rules, offering low wholesale prices and swift delivery. Once chosen, theyre constantly reevaluatedand quickly dropped for infractions such as requesting a price increase or planning to sell
directly to consumers via the Internet. They also receive sharp critiques of past performance, which are not
to be taken lightly.
A decade ago, General Electric failed to keep Home Depot stores supplied with lightbulbs, causing
shortages. Co-founder Bernard Marcus immediately stripped GE of its exclusive 80-foot shelf space and
flew off to negotiate with its Netherlands competitor, Phillips. Two years later, after high-level
negotiations, GE lightbulbs were back on Home Depot shelvesbut in a position inferior to Phillipss.
Such cautionary tales arent lost on vendors. However, they know that despite tough negotiating, Home
Depot is always looking for variety to please its customers changing tastes and demands. The sales
potential is so enormous that the compromises and concessions are worthwhile. If selected, vendors get
immediate distribution in more than 1,700 stores (Home Depot, EXPO, and other subsidiary companies)
across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.
Still, youve seen the stress on vendor reps faces as they explain product enhancements and on-time
delivery ideas in the review sessions. Their only consolation for this grueling process is that, although
merchandisers wont say yes or no on the spot, they do let manufacturers know where they stand within a
day or two. And the company is always willing to reconsider at the next product-line reviewwherever
its held.
Your task: Youre drafting some of the rejection letters, and the next one on your stack is to a faucet
manufacturer, Roseway Manufacturing, 133 Industrial Ave., Gary, IN, 46406. Too expensive, substandard
plastic handles, and a design not likely to appeal to Home Depot customers, say the panels notes. (And
knowing what its customers want has put Home Depot in the top 10 of the Fortune 500 list, with $400 billion in
annual sales.) Find a way to soften the blow in your rejection letter to Roseway. After all, consumer tastes do
change. Direct your letter to Pamela Wilson, operations manager.

Persuasive Letter Scenario

Create a letter using the AIDA model to persuade customers to stay with Colbar Art.
Give me liberty: letter from Colbar Art to its customers. For many people in the United States, the Statue of
Liberty is something of a tourist clich, so much a part of New York Citys tourist hype that its taken for
granted. But for many immigrants, the first sight of Liberty as they enter the city brings tears along with
hopes for a new life. Ovidiu Colea knows the feeling. He immigrated to the United States in the early 1980s,
after a difficult past that included five long years in a Romanian hard-labor camp for trying to flee a
communist regime.

Persuasive Letter Packet

Colea works two years as a cab driver to save enough money to start Colbar Art, a company that produces up
to 80,000 hand-crafted replicas of the Liberty status each year. He now helps other immigrants get a start in
their new country by hiring them to design and produce Liberty models. Colea pays a royalty to the LibertyEllis Island Foundation for using Libertys image. In fact, during the first year of operation, that royalty
amounted to $250,000.
Painstaking labor is required to produce the acrylic and bonded marble statues with a hand-painted patina,
and most of that work is done by the very immigrants lady Liberty welcomes to New York. Colea insists on
keeping production in the United States. Although labor costs are lower outside the country, he refuses to
produce the statues in countries where there is no liberty or no Statue of Liberty. By keeping jobs in the
United States, hes doing his share to keep the American dream alive.
But the meticulous labor also costs precious production time. With recent high demand for the replicas, the
company had fallen behind on orders. To increase production to 120,000 statues per year, the company is
leasing more space and training new employees. Meanwhile, the production deficits may continue for several
months.
Your task: You work for Colbar Art as assistant manager, and Colea has asked you to write a persuasive form
letter to all your customers, explaining the current delays and requesting patience. Be sure to explain the steps
the company is taking to solve these delays and describe the quality and creativity that go into the replicas. You
can quote Bradford Hill (owner of the Liberty Island gift shop), who says Colbar Arts models represent 65
percent of his sales. Make a convincing argument for your customers to remain loyal to Colbar Art.

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Assignment Assessment Rubric

Project
Component
Approach:
Does the writer use a
direct/indirect/AIDA approach
and does this choice seem
appropriate for the audience and
purpose?
Does the writer convey a clear
understanding of the audience in
the letter?
Does the reader get a clear sense
of the purpose?
O rganization:
Is the information organized in an
effective manner for its purpose?
For the bad news letter does the
writer provide a buffer, present
the bad news, and then provide a
positive closing?
For the persuasive letter does
the writer highlight common
ground, provide relevant details,
and indicate a course of action?
Me chanics and Tone:
Is the document free of
mechanical errors or problems?
Are unnecessary words
eliminated and is parallel
structure used?
Is the tone of the letter
appropriate for its purpose and
audience?
Format:
Does the document make use of
the proper format for a
professional business letter?
Is a basic letterhead included in
the document?
Me mo:
Does your memo discuss your
purpose(s) for each letter?
Does your memo specify the
audience you targeted and
describe some characteristics of
that audience?
Does your memo describe the
choices you made for each letter
that lead to them being more
effective?

Needs Work

OK

Good