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9 Chapter 9: Business Writing in Action

“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”

—Charles Horton Cooley

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.”

—Anonymous

Getting Started

Introductory Exercises

  1. Find a sample business document at work, at school, or online. Note its form and content. What stands out? What is effective? What is not? Share and compare with classmates.
  2. Find a résumé on the Internet—or create your own—and share it with your classmates. Using guidelines found in this chapter, https://buscommessentials.pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud/wp-admin/post.php?post=37&action=editdiscuss how to make it more effective.

Writing in the business environment rarely produces an isolated document. Most of the writing you’ll do at work will belong to a family of forms—quick texts, detailed emails, internal memos, formal letters, proposals, reports, résumés, and sales messages—each with its own structural expectations and each called for under different conditions. A sharp business writer learns to recognize which form fits a situation, and which form will undermine a message the moment it arrives in the reader’s inbox.

What follows in this chapter is a working tour of the major written forms you’ll encounter on the job. We’ll start with the short, high-frequency forms—text messages and emails—where tone and netiquette carry most of the weight. We’ll move through memoranda and letters, where format itself becomes a signal about audience and context. We’ll study the business proposal, where persuasion and structure collide. We’ll examine the report, where organization and evidence matter more than voice. We’ll turn to the résumé, where you become the document you’re writing. And we’ll close with the sales message, where everything you’ve learned about audience, purpose, and persuasion has to fit into a few paragraphs that do the hardest work in business writing: moving a reader from attention to action.

Each form has rules. Each form has a reason for those rules. And each form, once you understand it, becomes a tool you can pick up and use when the situation demands it.

Opening Case: The Proposal Weekend

At 6:47 p.m. on a Friday in early November, Althea Mbeki-Karadžić stood in the back galley of a forty-two-foot survey boat called the Seabright, stripping off a waterlogged pair of bib pants and listening to her phone buzz through the pocket. The boat was tied to the public dock at Rockland Harbor, Maine. The galley smelled like diesel, coffee grounds, and the wet-dog tang of neoprene dry-suit liners. Outside the porthole, a November rain was starting to come down sideways.

Althea was thirty-four years old, two years into her job as operations manager at Osprey Coastal Survey, and she was about to have the worst weekend of her professional life. She just didn’t know yet exactly how bad.

Osprey Coastal Survey was a family-owned bathymetric and hydrographic surveying outfit that had been run out of a converted fish warehouse on Tillson Avenue since 1974. Six full-time employees. Two survey boats. A battered utility van nicknamed “the Kestrel” after an older vessel they’d lost in a 1998 squall. The company mapped harbor bottoms for marinas, ran pre-dredge surveys for the Maine DOT, inspected aquaculture leases for the state, and did the occasional scour survey under a bridge or pier for an engineering firm. Their owner, Oriol Fagerholm-Quispe, was a sixty-seven-year-old former merchant mariner who still took the helm of the Seabright on every third job because he said a captain who stopped going out was a captain who stopped being a captain. Althea did everything else. She scheduled the jobs, handled the accounting with their part-time bookkeeper Kiyomi Danzig-Fuentes, managed the vendor contracts, chased the receivables, and—because she was the only person at Osprey who had written anything longer than a grocery list since college—she did all the writing.

All of it.

Althea pulled a dry fleece over her head, toed into a pair of cold rubber boots, and checked the phone. Seven texts. Three missed calls. An email notification counter that read 41. She scrolled through the texts first, because they were fastest.

The first one was from Oriol, sent from the pilothouse upstairs forty minutes earlier: Shackle on the davit sheared. Nobody hurt. Don’t tell Kiyomi til Monday. The second and third were from the same vendor they’d been fighting with for six weeks—Bellweather Marine Supply, owned by a man named Ransford Bellweather-Matsumoto, who had promised to deliver a replacement side-scan sonar transducer last Tuesday and now claimed it was “in the queue.” The fourth was from Marguerite Eldridge-Temelkov, Osprey’s senior hydrographer, who was home with the flu and had written only: Can you review the DOT proposal tonight? I’m toast. The fifth was from Ziyad Pennington-Okonkwo, the junior surveyor, asking whether Monday’s Belfast Harbor job was still on after the shackle incident. The sixth was from a cell number Althea didn’t recognize. The seventh was from Dr. Rhiannon Washburn-Sandhu, the principal engineer at MDOT’s bridge division, and it read: Pre-submission questions on RFP due by noon Saturday. Proposal itself still due Monday 8 a.m. No extensions.

Althea closed her eyes.

The RFP. The three-year MDOT harbor-survey contract. The thing Osprey Coastal had been chasing since August. The thing Oriol had spent two hours at Wednesday’s staff lunch explaining would “set us up for a decade” if they landed it. The thing Marguerite had been quarterbacking all month, with Althea handling the budget and boilerplate while Marguerite wrote the technical methodology. The thing that was due at eight o’clock Monday morning and that Marguerite, now sick with what sounded like real flu, was apparently no longer capable of finishing.

Althea climbed the ladder up to the pilothouse, found Oriol at the chart table cleaning hydraulic fluid off his hands with a shop rag, and told him what the texts said. Oriol didn’t speak for a long moment. Then he said, “You can do it.”

“I’ve never written an RFP response by myself.”

“You’ve edited every one Marguerite’s written for two years. You know what it looks like. I’ll handle the boat. You handle the paper.” He paused. “What else is on your desk?”

Althea started listing them, and as she said each one out loud the weekend took shape in front of her like something solidifying out of fog. A memo had to go out to all six employees by Saturday morning about the shackle incident—not to assign blame, but to pull the crew into a short safety review before the Belfast job on Monday, and to document in writing that Osprey had responded. Ziyad needed a text back about Monday. Bellweather needed an email firm enough to get the transducer on a truck but not so hot that it torched a working relationship they still needed. A letter had to go out to the Penobscot Yacht Club board—on Osprey letterhead, signed by Oriol, mailed first-class Saturday—acknowledging the board’s October decision to terminate their seasonal dock-survey contract six months early, responding professionally to the reasons they cited, and leaving the door cracked open for a future conversation. The quarterly operating report for the owner and the two silent partners was due in five days, and Kiyomi had sent her the raw numbers at three o’clock that afternoon. A résumé from a candidate named Flavia Knutson-Ekwueme, a certified hydrographer from Halifax who wanted to move to Midcoast Maine, was sitting in her inbox waiting for a decision on whether to bring her in for an interview—and if Osprey won the DOT contract, they were going to need her. And somewhere under all of that, sitting in a folder on Althea’s desktop she’d been promising herself she’d get to for three weeks, was a draft outreach message to the small aquaculture startups Osprey wanted to pitch on a new shallow-water mapping service—a service that could help carry the company through the slow months between the big contracts.

Eight writing jobs. Sixty-one hours until Monday at eight. And a proposal at the center of it that would either land the decade-long contract or slide quietly into the MDOT “not selected” folder with sixty other responses.

Oriol watched her counting them off. When she was done he said, “Which one do you start with?”

“The text to Ziyad. Thirty seconds. Then the memo, because if the Belfast crew shows up Monday and doesn’t know what happened to the davit, we look like we’re hiding it.”

“And then?”

Althea considered. “The letter to Penobscot Yacht Club. Because it has to be printed tonight to make the Saturday morning pickup.”

“And then?”

“Bellweather. Because if the transducer doesn’t ship by Monday, the DOT proposal has a hole in the equipment list and I can’t fill it with a promise.”

“And then the proposal itself.”

“Yes. And the quarterly report while the proposal’s compiling. And Flavia’s résumé has to get looked at before the interview offer goes out. And the aquaculture outreach—” she stopped. “The aquaculture message has to wait until Monday afternoon. There’s no world where I get to that before the proposal ships.”

Oriol folded the shop rag, set it on the chart table, and looked at her for a long time.

“Althea,” he said. “Every one of those things is a different kind of writing. You understand that, right?”

“I understand that.”

“A text isn’t a memo. A memo isn’t a letter. A letter isn’t a proposal. A proposal isn’t a report. A report isn’t a résumé. And none of them are sales messages. If you send the wrong kind, you might as well not send anything at all.”

Althea zipped her fleece up to the neck, picked up her bag, and started down the ladder toward the dock and the office and the sixty-one hours ahead of her.

“I know what they are, Oriol,” she said. “I just have to remember, while I’m writing each one, which one I’m writing.”

By the time she got back to the Tillson Avenue office it was quarter past seven. She turned on the desk lamp, opened a fresh notebook, and wrote eight headings down the left margin: Text. Memo. Letter. Email. Proposal. Report. Résumé. Sales message. Under each heading she wrote the recipient, the deadline, and one sentence describing what the document had to accomplish. Then she turned to the first heading and started to work.

Before You Read: Written Forms Self-Diagnostic

Take five minutes with these five questions before you read the chapter. Write your answers down. At the end of the chapter you’ll come back and compare.

  1. Althea is looking at eight writing tasks over a weekend: a text, a memo, a letter, an email, a proposal, a report, a résumé review, and a sales message. Before you read any further, write a one-sentence definition for each one—how would you tell a new coworker what each form is for and when to pick it?
  2. Rank those eight forms from most formal to least formal. Where did you put email? Where did you put the memo? Be ready to defend your ranking against the chapter’s version.
  3. Think of the last business text or email you sent. If your supervisor had read it over your shoulder before you pressed Send, would she have changed anything? What does your answer tell you about the difference between writing you send to friends and writing you send at work?
  4. What do you think is the single most important element of a business letter—the one element that, if you got it wrong, would undo the whole letter? Hold on to your answer.
  5. On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you right now that you could write a persuasive one-page sales email for a product you believe in? Write your number down. We’ll come back to it at the end of the chapter.

9.1 Text, E-mail, and Netiquette

Learning Objectives

  1. Identify the appropriate workplace uses of text messages and email, and explain when each is the right channel and when each is the wrong one.
  2. Describe the distinctive conventions of business texting—brevity, clarity, tone, and timing—and apply them to real work situations.
  3. Write a professional email that opens with a clear subject line, addresses the reader appropriately, states its purpose early, and closes with a specific call to action.
  4. Apply Virginia Shea’s ten rules of netiquette to digital communication in the workplace, with particular attention to tone, privacy, and the way messages read to audiences you can’t see.
  5. Recognize common digital missteps—replying to all by accident, escalating tone in a thread, copying the wrong people, forwarding without permission—and build habits that keep them from happening to you.

Text messages and emails are the workhorses of modern business communication. They make up the overwhelming majority of written exchanges in most workplaces, and they’re also the forms most likely to be sent carelessly. You write them in a hurry. You write them between other tasks. You write them on a phone, with your thumb, while walking across a parking lot. And because the stakes on any single message feel low, you stop noticing that the cumulative impression you’re making on your coworkers, your clients, and your boss is being built one short, hasty message at a time.

This section is about bringing the same care to the short forms that you would bring to a formal letter or a proposal. Not more care—you can’t afford more care, and the forms wouldn’t justify it. But the same kind of care. The same attention to audience. The same attention to tone. The same attention to whether the words on the screen are saying the thing you actually mean.

Case Connection: Althea’s Two Short Forms

Althea’s weekend starts with two short-form tasks that will take her about four minutes combined and that would take anyone new to the job about forty. A text back to Ziyad about whether Monday’s job is on. An email to Bellweather Marine Supply about the missing transducer. Neither of them will look like much when they’re done. Both of them are doing heavy lifting.

The text to Ziyad has to be clear enough that Ziyad doesn’t have to text back with a follow-up, which would cost Althea another interruption she can’t afford. It has to be warm enough that Ziyad doesn’t walk into Monday’s job feeling like he’s been treated as a replaceable body. And it has to contain enough information that if Ziyad’s phone gets wet on the boat Monday morning, the message in his archive still tells him what he needs to know. Three constraints. One short message.

The email to Bellweather is harder. Bellweather is a problem vendor Osprey still needs, which is the worst kind of vendor to deal with in writing. Too soft and the transducer doesn’t ship. Too hard and Osprey loses a supplier Althea will still need next spring. The email has to be professional enough to be forwardable (because Bellweather will forward it to his office manager), firm enough to communicate that Osprey is keeping records, and short enough that Bellweather actually reads it instead of skimming the first line and filing it. Everything in this section applies.

Texting in a Business Context

Whatever you call them—text messages, SMS, chat, DMs, or just “texts”—short written messages sent from one mobile device to another have become a standard feature of the workplace. Employees text their supervisors. Field crews text dispatchers. Sales reps text clients. Technicians text vendors. And increasingly, formal records of those exchanges are ending up in human resources files, lawsuits, and performance reviews.

Business texting has its own set of rules, and most of them come from the constraints of the form. A text is short. A text is fast. A text is read on a small screen by someone who is almost always in the middle of doing something else. A text that ignores those constraints is a text that fails.

Here are the tips that experienced business writers rely on when texting at work.

  • Know your recipient. A text to a peer your own age is a different kind of writing from a text to a sixty-year-old client you’ve never met. Default to more formal until you know the person well enough to relax. “c u @ 5” is fine for a friend; it’s a risk for a customer.
  • Anticipate unintentional misinterpretation. Texts strip out tone. A message that sounds dry and funny in your head can sound cold and angry on a stranger’s phone. Read your text out loud before you send it, imagining someone reading it who doesn’t know you.
  • Contacting someone too frequently can border on harassment. One text is a message. Three texts in ten minutes is a demand. Five texts in an hour is a problem. Ask yourself whether the situation justifies the interruption you’re creating.
  • Keep it short. If the message needs more than three or four sentences, it probably belongs in an email. Texts are for quick exchanges, not for content that should be archived, forwarded, or referred back to.
  • Follow the “reply or defer” rule. If you can’t answer a business text within a few hours, send a quick acknowledgment: Got it—will get back to you tonight. A silence on a work text is much louder than people realize.

Texting at work is a skill. The people who are good at it don’t send more texts than other people—they send fewer, and the ones they do send carry more information per word.[1]

Try It: Draft a Two-Line Reply

Put yourself in Althea’s position at 7:12 p.m. on Friday, sitting at her Tillson Avenue desk. She has to text Ziyad back about whether Monday’s Belfast Harbor job is on. Here’s what she knows: (1) the shackle failed on the Seabright’s davit during Friday’s job, (2) nobody was hurt, (3) the Belfast job uses a different piece of equipment and can go forward, (4) there will be a short safety review at the shop at 6:30 a.m. before the crew heads out, (5) Ziyad is twenty-three years old, has been with Osprey for fourteen months, and sometimes worries he’s about to be let go.

In no more than forty words, write the text Althea should send. Pay attention to what Ziyad needs to know, what he doesn’t need to know, and how the tone should land given that he’s a young employee who’s nervous about his standing. Compare your draft with a classmate’s. What did you include that they didn’t? What did they include that you missed?

E-mail

Virtually every professional, student, and teenager with Internet access uses email. It has nearly eliminated traditional letter-writing in business, and for good reason: it’s fast, searchable, and free. But those same advantages create problems. Because email is fast, people write it too quickly. Because it’s searchable, it outlives the moment it was written for. Because it’s free, there’s no cost to sending one more message and that turns inboxes into inboxes.

Email in a business context is a communication tool whose effectiveness depends on the writer understanding it as a hybrid form—more formal than a text, less formal than a letter, archived as a record, and read by an audience that may not stop at the person in the “To” line.

Here are tips that work regardless of the setting.

  • Proper salutations demonstrate respect and avoid mix-ups. “Dear Ms. Adamo” is different from “Hi, Harriet,” and both are different from “Hey.” The choice sends a message of its own.
  • Always include a subject line that clearly names your topic. Vague subject lines like “Following up” are how emails get lost. Specific subject lines like “Belfast Harbor job Monday—confirmed start time” are how emails get opened and acted on.
  • Keep messages clear and brief. Use short paragraphs. Use bullet points for lists. Put the most important information in the first two sentences.
  • Be friendly and cordial, but not too informal. You’re writing to a professional, not a friend. Save the smiley faces for the people who already know you.
  • Sign your message. A closing with your name, title, and contact information tells the reader who wrote this and how to reach you. It also makes the message forwardable.
  • Proofread. Every time. Typos in an email are like wrinkles in a shirt—none of them are fatal, but they all say something about how much care the writer took before walking out the door.
  • Reply promptly. Even a holding response—”I got this. I’ll have a full answer by Thursday”—is better than silence.
  • Use the “To,” “Cc,” and “Bcc” fields deliberately. The To field is for the people who need to act. The Cc field is for the people who need to know. The Bcc field is for the people who need to know without the other recipients being aware. Using these fields carelessly is how private emails end up public.

Consider the following example of an email message written by a professional in the construction field.

Sample E-mail

From: Mel Vargas, Construction Site Manager, Maxim Construction

To: Harriet Adamo, Physical Plant Manager, XYZ Corporation

Subject: Construction status of corporate headquarters

Dear Ms. Adamo,

I’m writing to update you on the progress of construction at the site of your new corporate headquarters. We are currently on track with our projected schedule and within budget for Phase One, the foundation and framing.

As of Friday, November 7, we have completed the following milestones:

  • Foundation inspection and approval
  • Rough framing of the first and second floors
  • Installation of the structural steel for the atrium

We are scheduled to begin Phase Two, the roofing and exterior envelope, the week of November 17. I will forward the updated Gantt chart to you by Tuesday morning so you can review the timeline for the electrical and plumbing rough-ins.

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to arrange a site visit. I am available for a walk-through any weekday morning before 10:00 a.m.

Sincerely,

Mel Vargas
Construction Site Manager, Maxim Construction
Office: (555) 123-4567
Cell: (555) 987-6543
mvargas@maximconstruction.example

Notice how Vargas opens with a clear statement of purpose, organizes his update into scannable pieces, ends with a specific call to action, and closes with full contact information. None of those moves are fancy. All of them are deliberate.[2][3]

Pro Tip: Read It as the Recipient Before You Send It

Before you hit Send on any work email, take thirty seconds to read it as if you were the person receiving it, not the person writing it. Read the subject line first, the way a recipient sees it in their inbox. Does the subject line tell them why they should open this message now instead of after lunch? Read the first sentence next. Does the first sentence answer the question the recipient is almost certainly going to ask—what does this email want from me? If the answer to either question is no, fix the email before you send it.

This is the single habit that separates the people who write effective workplace emails from the people who write emails that get skimmed, filed, and forgotten. It costs you thirty seconds per message and it saves you hours of follow-up.

Netiquette

We create personal pages, post messages, and interact via mediated technologies as a normal part of our careers, but how we conduct ourselves can leave a lasting image, literally. The photograph you posted on your page may have been seen by your potential employer, or the message you left on a friend’s page may be used against you in court. One classic pitfall in electronic communication is that anything you post on the Internet is likely to be there forever, and can be found later even if you think you’ve deleted it.

This is where netiquette—the etiquette of network communication—comes in. Virginia Shea’s Netiquette, written in 1994 but still widely cited, laid out ten core rules that remain useful today. They are:

  1. Remember the human on the other side of the electronic communication.
  2. Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life.
  3. Know where you are in cyberspace. What works on a casual discussion board does not work on a professional forum.
  4. Respect other people’s time and bandwidth. Don’t send messages that waste the reader’s attention.
  5. Make yourself look good online. Good spelling, grammar, and tone matter as much on a screen as on paper.
  6. Share expert knowledge. If you know something the reader needs, pass it along.
  7. Keep flame wars under control. Don’t escalate emotional exchanges in public.
  8. Respect other people’s privacy. Don’t forward private messages. Don’t post photos of coworkers without permission. Don’t screenshot what was sent to you in confidence.
  9. Don’t abuse your power. A supervisor writing to a subordinate has power the subordinate doesn’t have. Write as though you didn’t.
  10. Be forgiving of other people’s mistakes. Remember that everyone was new once.[4]

These rules are not a substitute for judgment. They are a set of defaults you can rely on when judgment fails—when you’re tired, when you’re angry, when you’re writing a message at 11 p.m. after a long day and you’re about to press Send on something you’ll regret in the morning.

Ethical Consideration: The Email That Outlives the Moment

Every email you send at work is a potential exhibit. It can be printed. It can be forwarded. It can be pulled from a server months or years after you sent it and read by people who were never in the original audience. Lawyers know this. HR professionals know this. You should know it too.

The test isn’t is this email something I’m comfortable with the person in the “To” line reading? The test is is this email something I’d be comfortable with my boss, my boss’s boss, and a stranger on a jury reading? If you can’t say yes to all three, don’t send the email. Pick up the phone. Walk to the other person’s desk. Wait until tomorrow. Do anything except write the thing down and press Send.

This isn’t about fear. It’s about the simple fact that written communication has a longer half-life than spoken communication, and that longer half-life cuts both ways. The same durability that makes a well-crafted email a useful record makes a careless one a permanent liability.

Key Takeaways

  • Text messages and emails are the highest-frequency forms of business writing, and the care you bring to them shapes your professional reputation one short message at a time.
  • Business texting works best when it is short, clear, deliberately sent, and written with the recipient’s situation in mind.
  • Email should open with a clear subject line, state its purpose in the first sentence, and close with a specific call to action and the writer’s full signature.
  • Netiquette provides a set of defaults—respect, clarity, restraint, privacy—that protect you when you’re writing under pressure.
  • Every digital message you send at work is potentially a permanent record. Write accordingly.

Exercises

  1. Find a business email you’ve received recently (personal inbox, spam folder, or a sample online). Evaluate it against the eight email tips in this section. Which tips did the writer follow? Which did they miss? Share your analysis with classmates.
  2. Rewrite the Mel Vargas sample email to Harriet Adamo in two versions: one that is too casual for the context, and one that is too formal. Compare all three versions. What do the differences tell you about how tone shapes audience response?
  3. Interview a working professional about their email habits. How many emails do they send in a typical workday? What’s the longest one they’ve written? What’s the shortest one they’ve regretted? Summarize your findings in a one-page report.
  4. Pick any one of Virginia Shea’s ten netiquette rules and write a one-paragraph example of a workplace situation where following that rule would have prevented a problem. Share with your classmates.
  5. Draft a text message, an email, and a handwritten note that all deliver the same core information: that you will be fifteen minutes late to a meeting with a client. Compare how the same content reshapes itself for each form.

9.2 Memoranda and Letters

Learning Objectives

  1. Distinguish a memorandum from a letter and explain which form fits which audience, context, and purpose.
  2. Write an effective business memo that applies audience orientation, professional tone, subject emphasis, direct format, and objectivity.
  3. Identify the fifteen elements of a business letter and explain what each element contributes to the reader’s experience of the document.
  4. Compose a business letter in block format that matches its purpose to its structure, from greeting through closing.
  5. Recognize when the situation calls for a memo, when it calls for a letter, and when it calls for something else entirely.

Once you move past texts and email, you enter the territory of the more structured written forms. Memoranda and letters look old-fashioned next to a text message, but they are alive and well in contemporary business, and for good reason. Each one carries signals that shorter forms can’t. A memo says: this is an official communication from me to the members of my organization. A letter says: this is a formal communication from our organization to you, as an outside party, that we expect you to take seriously and that we’re willing to commit to paper. The forms themselves do rhetorical work. Understanding what that work is—and when you need it done—is what this section is about.

Case Connection: Two Documents, Two Audiences, Two Formats

Look at the second and third items on Althea’s weekend list: the internal memo to the Osprey staff about the sheared shackle, and the letter to the Penobscot Yacht Club board about the terminated contract. They are almost exactly the same length. They will both take Althea about an hour each to write. They will both be written from the same desk, at the same lamp, on the same Friday night.

But they are not interchangeable. The memo is internal. Its audience is six people who all know the Seabright, all know Oriol, and all have a direct stake in what the davit failure means for Monday’s job and next week’s. The letter is external. Its audience is a group of yacht-club board members who have already decided to fire Osprey and who have no stake in Osprey’s internal safety culture. Same writer. Same Friday night. Same fourteen hundred words on a legal pad. Two entirely different documents, because the relationship between Osprey and its audience is completely different in each case.

This is the fundamental distinction between a memo and a letter. Form follows audience, and audience follows relationship. If you understand the relationship, you can pick the form. If you pick the wrong form, you signal that you didn’t understand the relationship—and that’s a hard signal to recover from.

Memorandum (Memo)

A memo (or memorandum, meaning “reminder”) is normally used for communicating policies, procedures, or related official business within an organization. It’s often written from a one-to-all perspective (like mass communication), broadcasting a message to an audience, rather than a one-on-one, interpersonal communication. It may also be used to update a team on activities for a given project, or to inform a specific group within a company of an event, action, or observance.

Memos are used for internal communications about procedures or official business within an organization. Unlike an e-mail, a memo is a message you send to a large group of employees, like your entire department or everyone at the company. You might need to write a memo to inform staff of upcoming events, or broadcast internal changes.

If you’re asked to write a memo, here are the five tips to keep in mind that separate a memo people read from a memo that lands in the round file.

  • Audience orientation. Always consider the audience and their needs when preparing a memo. An acronym or abbreviation that is known to management may not be known by all the employees of the organization, and if the memo is to be posted and distributed within the organization, the goal is clear and concise communication at all levels with no ambiguity.
  • Professional, formal tone. Memos are often announcements, and the person sending the memo speaks for a part or all of the organization. While it may contain a request for feedback, the announcement itself is linear, from the organization to the employees. The memo may have legal standing as it often reflects policies or procedures, and may reference an existing or new policy in the employee manual.
  • Subject emphasis. The subject line on a memo does a job it doesn’t do on an email: it stands in for a greeting. The reader sees “MEMO” at the top of the page, then “TO,” then “FROM,” then “DATE,” then the subject line, and then the body. By the time the reader reaches the body, the subject line has already told them what the memo is about. Make it count.
  • Direct format. Some written business communication allows for a choice between direct and indirect formats. Memorandums are not among them. Memos open with the main point in the first sentence or first paragraph. Everything else follows in order of importance. The reader shouldn’t have to hunt for the lead.
  • Objectivity. Memos are a place for just the facts, and should have an objective tone without personal bias, preference, or interest on display. Avoid subjectivity.

Sample Memo

MEMORANDUM

TO: All Employees
FROM: Larry Ogawa, Communications Director
DATE: January 12, 2020
SUBJECT: Change in Holiday Schedule

In accordance with the university’s new budget-tightening measures, UState will observe a modified holiday schedule beginning this calendar year.

The following holidays will be observed by all staff with paid leave:

  • New Year’s Day
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
  • Memorial Day
  • Independence Day
  • Labor Day
  • Thanksgiving Day and the day after
  • Christmas Day

Employees who previously received paid leave for holidays not on this list (including Columbus Day, Veterans Day, and the day after Independence Day) will need to use accrued personal leave, vacation time, or take the day without pay.

If you have any questions regarding this change, please contact the Human Resources office at extension 4141.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation as UState works to manage expenses while preserving the quality of our academic programs.

Notice how Ogawa’s memo opens with the main point in the first sentence, organizes the affected holidays into a scannable list, explains the consequence clearly, and closes with a contact point for follow-up. The memo is brief, but it is not thin. Every sentence is carrying load.

Try It: Write the Shackle Memo

Althea has to send a memo Saturday morning to all six Osprey employees about the davit shackle that sheared during Friday’s job. Here’s what she has to accomplish in that memo: (1) inform the crew of what happened, without assigning blame before an inspection, (2) announce the short safety review at the shop at 6:30 a.m. Monday before the Belfast job goes out, (3) remind the crew of the procedure for reporting equipment concerns, (4) reassure the staff that nobody was hurt and that the incident is being documented as part of Osprey’s normal safety process.

Write the memo in no more than two hundred words, using the five tips in this section. Have a classmate check whether your subject line, opening sentence, and closing sentence meet the standard set by Ogawa’s sample memo. Revise and exchange drafts.

Letter

Letters are brief messages sent to recipients that are often outside the organization. They are often printed on letterhead paper, and represent the business or organization in one or two pages. Shorter messages may include e-mails or memos, either hard copy or electronic, while reports tend to be three or more pages in length.

While e-mail and text messages may be used more frequently today, the effective business letter remains a common form of written communication. It can serve to introduce you to a potential employer, announce a product or service, or even serve to communicate feelings and emotions. We’ll examine the basic outline of a letter and then focus on specific products or services and how they are arranged and organized.

Letters may be written for a variety of purposes. A few of the more common purposes are to transmit information, communicate policy changes, request action, express gratitude, and maintain relationships with external partners. Letters may be informal or formal, following certain predetermined conventions.

A common structure for a letter includes the following elements.

Table 9.1 — Elements of a Business Letter

  1. Return Address. This is your address where someone could send a reply. If your letter includes a letterhead with this information, either in the header (across the top of the page) or the footer (along the bottom of the page), you do not need to include it before the date.
  2. Date. Include the date you send the letter. If you’re using letterhead with a preprinted date, place your date below the letterhead.
  3. Reference (Re:). A sentence or two describing what the letter is about, often including reference numbers and order numbers.
  4. Delivery (Mode of Delivery). Delivery modes might include “Via Certified Mail,” “By Facsimile,” or “Hand Carried.”
  5. Recipient Note. Many business letters include a note about confidentiality, such as “Private,” “Confidential,” or “For the intended recipient only.”
  6. Inside Address. Name and address of the letter recipient, including the person’s title.
  7. Salutation/Greeting. “Dear Ms. Smith,” “Dear Board Members,” “To Whom It May Concern.”
  8. Introduction. This is your opening paragraph, and may include an attention statement, a reference to the purpose of the document, or an introduction of the person or topic depending on the type of letter. An emphatic opening involves using the most significant or important element of the letter in the introduction. Readers tend to pay attention to openings, and it makes sense to outline the expectations for the reader up front. Just as you would preview your topic in a speech, the clear opening in your introductions establishes context and facilitates comprehension.
  9. Body. If you have a list of points, a series of facts, or a number of questions, they belong in the body of your letter. You may choose organizational devices to draw attention, such as a bullet list, or simply number them. Readers may skip over information in the body of your letter, so make sure you emphasize the key points clearly. This is no place to be subtle or vague.
  10. Conclusion. An emphatic closing mirrors your introduction with the added element of tying the main points together, clearly demonstrating their relationship. The conclusion can serve to reinforce the main ideas of the letter and call to action, or it may suggest an action to be taken.
  11. Close. “Sincerely” or “Cordially” are standard business closing statements. (“Love,” “Yours Truly,” and “Ciao” are closings typically reserved for personal correspondence.)
  12. Signature. Five lines after the close, you should type your name (required) and, on the line below it, your title (optional).
  13. Preparation Line. If the letter was prepared, or word-processed, by someone other than the signatory, that fact may be included with two lowercase letters followed by two uppercase letters of the typist (e.g., “ab/CD” or “ab:CD”).
  14. Enclosures/Attachments. Just like an e-mail with an attachment, the letter sometimes has additional documents that are delivered with it. To acknowledge their presence, note “Enclosures (x)” or “Attachments (x)” where x is the number of items.
  15. Courtesy Copies (“cc”). The abbreviation “cc” once stood for carbon copies but now refers to courtesy copies. Just like a “cc” option in an e-mail, it indicates the relevant parties that will also receive a copy of the document.

Now let’s look at a sample letter that incorporates many of these elements.

Sample Letter

Paige Turner, Instructor
Department of English
Ridgeback Community College
415 Academic Way
Westfield, CA 90210

October 15, 2020

Re: Fall Semester Book Order, Business Communication

Silver State Publishing
Attn: Textbook Orders
1125 Publisher Lane
Sacramento, CA 95814

Dear Silver State Publishing Team,

Please accept this letter as confirmation of my textbook order for the upcoming spring semester for Business Communication 101. I am requesting thirty-five copies of Business Communication for Success by Scott McLean, to be delivered to the Ridgeback Community College bookstore no later than December 15, 2020, for distribution to students at the start of the spring semester on January 8, 2021.

A purchase order from the Ridgeback Community College Business Office is attached. Please confirm receipt of this order by e-mail at the address in my signature block below, and forward a tracking number to me once the books have been shipped.

If you have any questions about the order or require additional information, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly. Thank you for your prompt attention to this request.

Sincerely,

Paige Turner
Instructor, Department of English
Ridgeback Community College
pturner@ridgebackcc.example
(555) 234-5678

Enclosures (1)

cc: Dr. Eloise Martinez, Bookstore Manager

Notice how every element of the letter—from the return address to the cc line—is doing work. The inside address creates a record of who the letter was sent to. The reference line tells the recipient’s mail-sorting office what the letter is about before they open it. The emphatic opening identifies the purpose in the first sentence. The body provides the specific details (quantity, title, author, deadline) the publisher needs to act. The close commits to a specific follow-up. And the cc line tells both Silver State Publishing and Paige Turner’s bookstore manager that everyone in the loop is in the loop.

Common Mistake: Writing a Letter When You Mean a Memo (or Vice Versa)

The fastest way to send a confusing message in a business context is to pick the wrong form. A letter to your own staff sounds stiff and strange—as though you’re addressing your coworkers like strangers. A memo to an external client sounds presumptuous—as though you’re treating someone outside your organization like an insider who already knows your acronyms and policies.

If you find yourself starting a letter with “TO: All Staff,” stop and ask whether a memo would be more appropriate. If you find yourself starting a memo with “Dear Mr. Smith,” stop and ask whether a letter would be more appropriate. The two forms exist because they serve two different audiences, and mixing them up is a small mistake that readers notice every time.

Key Takeaways

  • Memos are internal documents that communicate policies, procedures, and announcements to members of an organization.
  • Effective memos apply audience orientation, a professional and formal tone, subject emphasis, direct format, and objectivity.
  • Letters are external documents that represent one organization to another and follow a conventional structure of fifteen elements, each doing specific work for the reader.
  • The choice between a memo and a letter is a choice about audience and relationship—pick the form that matches the rhetorical situation.

Exercises

  1. Find a sample memo and a sample letter online (your school’s website, a company’s investor relations page, a nonprofit’s annual report). Compare them using the criteria in this section. What does each one do well? What would you revise?
  2. Althea has to send a letter to the Penobscot Yacht Club board acknowledging their October decision to terminate Osprey’s seasonal dock-survey contract. Draft the letter using the fifteen elements in Table 9.1. Remember: the relationship is worth preserving, even if the contract is not.
  3. Rewrite the Larry Ogawa holiday-schedule memo as a letter to an external stakeholder (say, a parent of a UState student). What changes? Why?
  4. Imagine you need to send the same information—a company’s decision to raise its prices by eight percent—to three different audiences: your own employees, your regular wholesale customers, and your local newspaper. Draft the opening paragraph for each of the three versions. Compare and discuss.

9.3 Business Proposal

Learning Objectives

  1. Define a business proposal and explain the role it plays in the sales process of many organizations.
  2. Distinguish between solicited and unsolicited proposals and recognize the different rhetorical challenges each one creates.
  3. Identify the standard elements of a business proposal and the function each element serves for the reader.
  4. Apply the classical rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos to the argument of a persuasive proposal.
  5. Write a short proposal that responds directly to a solicitation and makes a clear, evidence-based case for acceptance.

Proposals are documents designed to make a persuasive appeal to the audience to achieve a defined outcome, often proposing a solution to a problem. They are, in essence, a specialized form of argumentative writing. A business proposal argues for a course of action—hiring this consultant, adopting this vendor, approving this budget line—and asks the reader to commit to it. Unlike a sales letter, which has to create the sense of need on its own, a proposal often enters a conversation that has already started. The reader has a problem. Someone somewhere has articulated that problem in writing. The proposal arrives in response.

Case Connection: The Document That Set Up the Decade

The center of Althea’s weekend is the response to MDOT’s request for proposals on a three-year harbor-survey contract. Marguerite had been quarterbacking it for a month; now Marguerite is home sick and Althea has to finish it herself. The proposal is due Monday at 8:00 a.m., and its technical methodology section, its budget, its project timeline, its team bios, its past-performance summary, and its executive summary all have to be coherent with one another by the time the document ships.

Everything in this section applies to what Althea is doing. The fact that it’s a solicited proposal (MDOT asked for responses) shapes the opening. The specific language of the RFP shapes the structure. The scoring rubric MDOT publishes shapes the emphasis on particular sections. The competition—sixty-odd other firms submitting responses—shapes the stakes. And the distinction Oriol made in the pilothouse (“a proposal isn’t a report”) is the distinction Althea has to hold in her head the whole weekend: a proposal is a persuasive document first and an informational one second.

Types of Proposals

Proposals may be divided into two categories: solicited and unsolicited. A solicited proposal is one where the request for the proposal is made explicit, and the writer responds to that request. When a specific request is made for a proposal, it is typically in response to a call, announcement, or request for a proposal. The request is called a Request for Proposal (RFP), Request for Quotation (RFQ), or Invitation for Bid (IFB). Each type of request carries subtle differences. An RFP is typically more open-ended, asking the bidder to propose a solution. An RFQ is more specific, asking for a quoted price on a clearly defined set of goods or services. An IFB is the most constrained, treating the contract as a competitive bid on a fixed set of deliverables. The differences matter. A proposal that answers an RFP with an RFQ-style response will leave the reader wondering whether the bidder understood the problem.

An unsolicited proposal is one where the writer proposes a solution to a problem the organization may or may not yet recognize as a problem. Unsolicited proposals are harder to write and harder to sell, but they are also often the proposals that open new opportunities. They require the writer to do three things at once: establish that a problem exists, establish that the writer understands it, and establish that the writer can solve it—all before any of the reader’s attention has been allocated to the topic.

In both cases, the central challenge is the same. A proposal is an argument. It makes a claim (our approach is the best one for your problem), it supports that claim with evidence (here is our methodology, here is our team, here is our past performance), and it anticipates the reader’s objections (here is how we will handle the risks you are about to raise). The reader of a proposal is not a passive audience. The reader of a proposal is a skeptic who is asking, in every paragraph, why should I believe you? A good proposal answers that question before it is asked.

As the late arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi once observed to Time magazine, “If a proposal is more than one page long, it’s not going anywhere.”[5] Khashoggi’s line is an exaggeration—many successful proposals run to dozens of pages—but it captures a truth that every experienced proposal writer eventually learns.[6] The decision-makers who approve proposals are busy. They skim. They look for the key pieces of information in predictable locations. A proposal that buries its main points in the middle of page seven is a proposal that loses to a proposal whose main points are on page one.

Common Proposal Elements

Most business proposals—whether solicited or unsolicited, short or long—share a common core of elements. The specific structure varies by industry and by the requirements of the soliciting organization, but the elements below appear in some form in nearly every successful proposal.

Table 9.2 — Business Proposal Format

Element Function
Executive Summary A one-page summary of the proposal that stands on its own. The reader should be able to understand the problem, the solution, and the cost from this page alone.
Background/Statement of Problem Demonstrates that the writer understands the situation the reader is facing. This section shows the reader that you have been listening.
Proposed Solution/Methodology Describes what the writer will do, step by step, to solve the problem. This is the technical heart of the proposal.
Qualifications of Personnel Identifies the people who will do the work and their relevant expertise. Includes résumés or bios of key team members.
Schedule/Timeline A realistic project schedule showing milestones, deliverables, and dates.
Costs/Budget A transparent breakdown of what the work will cost, including line items where appropriate.
Benefits to the Client Explains the value of accepting the proposal in terms the reader cares about—efficiency, quality, cost savings, reduced risk.
Past Performance/References Shows that the writer’s organization has done similar work successfully before.
Call to Action States clearly what the writer is asking the reader to do, by when, and what happens next.

A proposal is built from these elements in an order that answers the reader’s questions in the sequence the reader will ask them. What is this? Why should I care? Do you understand my problem? What will you do about it? Who’s doing the work? How long will it take? What will it cost? Why should I believe you can deliver? What do you want from me? Every element in the list above answers one of those questions. A proposal that answers them in a logical sequence is a proposal that reads cleanly. A proposal that scrambles them is a proposal the reader abandons.

Pro Tip: Ethos, Pathos, Logos in the Proposal

Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion—ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic)—map cleanly onto the sections of a business proposal. The qualifications section, the past performance section, and the references section are ethos moves: they establish that the writer’s organization is credible and trustworthy. The benefits section and the background section are pathos moves: they connect the proposal to what the reader cares about and the reader’s sense of the problem they are living with. The methodology section, the schedule, and the budget are logos moves: they lay out the logical, step-by-step argument for why this proposal makes sense.

A proposal that relies entirely on logos—just the methodology and the budget, with no relationship to the reader and no evidence of credibility—reads cold and gets passed over for a proposal that seems to understand the reader better. A proposal that relies entirely on pathos—all relationship-building and benefit-selling, with no technical detail—reads hollow and loses to a proposal with real methodology. A proposal that relies entirely on ethos—credentials and past performance with no clear methodology or connection to the specific problem—reads self-absorbed and loses to a proposal that seems to have actually listened to what the client asked for. The best proposals do all three.

On Saturday afternoon, having spent three hours drafting the methodology section and another two on the budget, Althea sits down to write the executive summary—and realizes she can’t. She knows what Osprey is proposing (multi-beam bathymetric surveys of six MDOT-managed harbors over three years, with an optional two-year extension). She knows what it will cost. She knows who’s doing it. What she can’t figure out is how to say all of that in one page in a way that would actually make Dr. Washburn-Sandhu and the MDOT review committee want to keep reading.

This is the hardest writing moment in the whole weekend, and it is not an accident that the executive summary is hard. The executive summary is the whole proposal compressed to one page. Every word has to carry weight. Every sentence has to either establish credibility, connect to the reader’s problem, or advance the logical case for Osprey. There is no room for throat-clearing. There is no room for hedging. The executive summary is where ethos, pathos, and logos have to do all three of their jobs in the space of about four hundred words.

When Althea finally writes the executive summary, at about 9:30 Saturday night, it takes her forty minutes to write, ten minutes to revise, and it becomes the single most important page in the entire 38-page response document.

Key Takeaways

  • A business proposal is a persuasive document that argues for a specific course of action, usually in response to a problem the reader is already trying to solve.
  • Solicited proposals respond to an RFP, RFQ, or IFB; unsolicited proposals introduce the problem as well as the solution.
  • Standard proposal elements include an executive summary, problem statement, methodology, team qualifications, schedule, budget, benefits, past performance, and a clear call to action.
  • Proposals persuade through a blend of ethos (credibility), pathos (connection to the reader’s situation), and logos (logical argument and evidence).

Exercises

  1. Find a Request for Proposal online (many government agencies publish RFPs publicly). Read it carefully and identify the scoring criteria. Draft a one-page outline for a response that addresses each scoring criterion explicitly. Share your outline with classmates.
  2. Write a one-page unsolicited proposal to your school or workplace proposing a small improvement (a new recycling bin, a new posting on the break-room bulletin board, a minor process change). Pay attention to how you establish that the problem exists before you propose the solution.
  3. Locate a published executive summary from a business proposal or grant application. Analyze it for ethos, pathos, and logos. Which mode of persuasion does it lean on most heavily? Why do you think the writer made that choice?
  4. Interview a working professional who has written or reviewed business proposals. What makes a proposal stand out from the stack? What is the most common mistake they see proposal writers make? Summarize your findings in a one-page memo to your class.

9.4 Report

Learning Objectives

  1. Define a business report and explain how it differs from a proposal, a memo, and a letter.
  2. Distinguish informational reports from analytical reports and describe the decisions each type supports.
  3. Identify the common types of business reports and the circumstances in which each is used.
  4. Describe the standard elements of a business report and explain the function of each.
  5. Organize the content of a report so that the reader can navigate from executive summary to appendices without getting lost.

Reports are documents designed to record and convey information to the reader. Reports are part of any business or organization; from credit reports to police reports, they serve to document specific information for specific audiences, goals, or functions. The type of report is often identified by its primary purpose or function, as in an accident report, a laboratory report, a sales report, or even a book report. Reports are often analytical, or involve the rational analysis of information. Sometimes they simply “report the facts” with no analysis at all, but still need to communicate the information in a clear and concise format. Other reports summarize past events, present current data, and forecast future trends. While a report may have conclusions, propositions, or even a call to action, the demonstration of the analysis is the primary function.

Case Connection: The Quarterly Report Under the Proposal

While the MDOT proposal compiles on Saturday afternoon, Althea turns to the next document on her list: the quarterly operating report for Oriol and Osprey’s two silent partners. Kiyomi has sent her the raw numbers from the bookkeeping system—revenue by project category, labor hours by employee, fuel and equipment costs, accounts receivable aging, a list of contracts won and lost during Q3. Althea has to turn those numbers into a document Oriol and the partners can read in fifteen minutes and come out of with a clear picture of how Osprey is doing.

Notice how different this document is from the proposal. The proposal is persuasive: it’s arguing for a future outcome. The report is informational: it’s describing what has already happened. The proposal hides its conclusion in the executive summary because Althea wants the reader to work through the evidence. The report leads with its conclusion because Oriol and the partners want the bottom line first and the supporting data second. Same writer. Same Saturday afternoon. Two documents doing two different jobs.

Types of Reports

Reports come in all sizes, but are typically longer than a letter or memo. There are two main categories for reports, regardless of their specific type or length. A report may be informational or analytical.

An informational report informs or instructs and presents details of events, activities, individuals, or conditions without analysis. An example of this type of report would be an account of a meeting—a record of what was said, decided, and deferred. The writer records the facts but does not analyze or interpret them. Another common informational report is the weekly or monthly sales report, which documents what was sold, to whom, and at what prices.

An analytical report presents information with a comprehensive analysis to solve problems, demonstrate relationships, or make recommendations. An example of an analytical report would be a marketing plan that examines the state of a market, identifies opportunities, and proposes specific actions. Another common analytical report is the annual report that reviews a year’s operations and sets goals for the year ahead.

Analytical reports are generally more complex than informational reports because they require the writer to interpret the data, draw conclusions, and often make recommendations based on those conclusions. The writer of an analytical report has to be comfortable with the information long enough to think about it, not just summarize it.

Table 9.3 — Types of Reports and Their Functions

Type of Report Function
Laboratory or Test Report Communicates the results of a test or experiment
Research or Investigation Report Examines an issue or problem and presents findings
Incident Report Documents an event, such as an accident or workplace injury
Progress Report Updates an audience on the status of an ongoing project
Sales or Activity Report Summarizes sales figures or business activities over a period
Budget Report Presents financial data and budget performance
Feasibility Report Assesses whether a proposed project or course of action is practical
Recommendation Report Offers recommendations based on analysis of a problem
Compliance Report Shows that an organization is meeting regulatory or contractual requirements
Annual Report Reviews the past year and presents goals for the year ahead
Audit Report Presents the findings of an audit of an organization’s finances or operations
Benchmark Report Compares an organization’s performance against an industry standard or peer group
Examination Report Documents a professional examination, such as a medical or engineering review
Field Study Report Presents observations and data collected in the field
Justification Report Argues for a particular decision or investment
White Paper Educates readers on a complex issue and presents a position
Yardstick Report Evaluates several possible courses of action against a set of criteria
Trip Report Summarizes the purposes, activities, and outcomes of a business trip

Each of these report types serves a distinct function, but they share a common structural vocabulary. Once you understand the common elements of a report, you can produce any of these types by adjusting the emphasis on each element to suit the purpose at hand.

Common Elements of a Report

There are four general types of reports; some formats may contain more or fewer elements depending on purpose and industry, but ten elements appear in most well-organized reports.

Table 9.4 — Common Elements of a Report

  1. Executive Summary. A one-page overview that highlights the key findings and recommendations. Busy readers often read only this section, so it must stand on its own.
  2. Introduction. Includes the background, problem, or purpose of the report and introduces the topic to the reader.
  3. Background. Provides context for the report, often including a summary of previous reports on the same topic or a description of the conditions that led to the current report.
  4. Methodology. Describes how the information in the report was gathered, analyzed, and verified.
  5. Findings or Results. Presents the data, observations, or information that the report has gathered, typically organized by topic or theme.
  6. Discussion or Analysis. Interprets the findings and explains what they mean for the reader.
  7. Conclusions. Summarizes the implications of the findings and the analysis.
  8. Recommendations. Suggests specific actions based on the conclusions (in an analytical report).
  9. References. Lists the sources cited in the report.
  10. Appendices. Provides supplementary material—tables, charts, raw data, supporting documents—that supports the report but would clutter the main text.

Not every report uses all ten elements. A short progress report might have only an introduction, findings, and recommendations. A long feasibility study might have all ten, plus several appendices. The key is to match the structure to the purpose and to signal the structure clearly to the reader, typically through headings and a table of contents.

Reflection Write: Your Last Report

Think about the last time you wrote something that could reasonably be called a report—a lab write-up, a field report for a class, a project update for a supervisor, even a book report in high school. Which of the ten elements in Table 9.4 did you include? Which did you leave out? Looking back at the structure you used, do you think the elements you included made it easier for the reader, or do you think the structure was more for you than for them?

Write a one-paragraph reflection on what you’d do differently if you were writing the same document today, after studying the elements in this section. Be specific about which elements you’d add and why.

Key Takeaways

  • Reports document and convey information and may be informational (reporting facts) or analytical (interpreting facts and making recommendations).
  • Common types of reports include progress, sales, budget, feasibility, recommendation, compliance, annual, incident, audit, and white paper reports.
  • Most reports include ten common elements: executive summary, introduction, background, methodology, findings, discussion, conclusions, recommendations, references, and appendices.
  • Effective reports lead with their conclusions for busy readers and use headings and structure to help those readers navigate to the sections they need.

Exercises

  1. Find a published annual report (many nonprofits and public companies post theirs online). Identify which of the ten common elements appear in it. What’s emphasized? What’s minimized? What does that tell you about the audience?
  2. Write a short progress report on a project you’re currently working on—a class assignment, a job task, a personal project. Use the ten elements as a checklist and include the ones that fit. Have a classmate read it and tell you whether they can understand your progress without needing follow-up questions.
  3. Compare an informational report (a weekly sales summary, a meeting minutes document) to an analytical report (a marketing plan, a business case) from the same industry. What’s different about the sentence-level prose in each? How does the analytical report signal its interpretation of the data?
  4. Draft the executive summary for Althea’s Q3 operating report for Osprey Coastal Survey. Assume total Q3 revenue of $184,000 (up 6 percent year-over-year), labor utilization of 71 percent, one contract lost (Penobscot Yacht Club), one new contract won (Camden Harbor bathymetric survey), and a flat cash position. Your summary should stand alone on one page.

9.5 Résumé

Learning Objectives

  1. Define a résumé and explain its function in the hiring process.
  2. Identify the standard sections of a résumé and what each section contributes to the reader’s overall impression.
  3. Distinguish among reverse chronological, functional, combination, targeted, and scannable résumés and select the best format for a particular situation.
  4. Write work-experience entries that emphasize results and impact rather than job duties.
  5. Recognize how résumés are read by both human reviewers and applicant tracking systems, and adapt accordingly.

A résumé is a document that summarizes your education, skills, talents, employment history, and experiences in a clear and concise format for potential employers.[7] The résumé serves three distinct purposes that define its form and presentation. First, it serves as an introduction to a prospective employer. Second, it is a record of your education, experience, and skills that can be used to provide specific details as requested. Third, it is a summary that can be used to apply for a position, a promotion, or an award. The audience for your résumé may be a human reviewer who reads several dozen résumés a day, or it may be an applicant tracking system that parses the document before a human ever sees it. Either way, the document has to be easy to read, easy to search, and quick to grasp.

Case Connection: Flavia’s Résumé on Althea’s Desk

Sometime around 11:00 Sunday morning—proposal compiling, report drafted, memo sent, letter printed, Bellweather email sent, text to Ziyad long since delivered—Althea opens the résumé Flavia Knutson-Ekwueme sent last Tuesday. Flavia is a certified hydrographer currently working for a Halifax firm and looking to move to Maine. Osprey can’t hire her until the MDOT contract is settled, but Althea needs to make a recommendation about whether to bring Flavia in for an interview, and she has about twenty minutes to read the résumé carefully enough to make that call.

Everything Flavia chose when she designed that résumé is working for or against her right now. The format—reverse chronological, scannable, one page—works for Althea because Althea can read it in under two minutes. The decision to lead with the current Halifax job works for Flavia because it tells Althea the important thing first. The decision to quantify the results of her previous projects (“surveyed 412 kilometers of St. Lawrence River bottom, reducing MCTS error budget by 37 percent”) works for her because it converts job duties into impact. And the decision to include a short “Professional Memberships” section at the bottom works for her because it tells Althea that Flavia is connected to the hydrographic community in ways that will matter for Osprey’s credibility on the MDOT contract.

Althea forwards the résumé to Oriol with one line: Bring her in.

Types of Résumés

There are several specific types of résumés, each with a particular use. A résumé isn’t a one-size-fits-all document. The format you pick should match the job you’re applying for and the story you’re trying to tell the reader about your career.

Table 9.5 — Types of Résumés

  1. Reverse Chronological. Lists jobs and education in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent. The most common format; favored by traditional employers and easy for applicant tracking systems to parse.
  2. Functional. Organizes experience by skill category rather than by job, emphasizing what you can do rather than where you did it. Useful when you’re changing careers, when you’ve had gaps in employment, or when your skills don’t line up neatly with your job titles.
  3. Combination. Combines elements of the reverse chronological and functional formats. Leads with a skills summary and follows with a reverse chronological employment history.
  4. Targeted. Tailored to a specific job posting. The writer rewrites the summary, rearranges the skills, and adjusts the experience descriptions to mirror the language of the posting. Most effective when the writer has time to customize for each application.
  5. Scannable. Designed for applicant tracking systems. Uses a simple layout, standard fonts, and keywords pulled from the job description. Avoids graphics, tables, and unusual characters that may confuse automated parsers.

In practice, most job seekers end up using a combination approach: a reverse-chronological structure with targeted language, formatted for scannability. The goal is to produce a document that reads well to a human skim and parses cleanly for a machine.

Sections of a Résumé

A résumé typically includes these sections, although the exact order and the naming of the sections varies by industry and career stage.

Sample Contact Block

Ima Jobseeker
1234 Main Street
Anytown, USA 00000
(555) 555-1212
ijobseeker@example.com

The contact block appears at the top of the résumé and gives the reader the information they need to reach you: your name, mailing address (optional), phone number, and email address. Some contemporary résumés include a LinkedIn URL or a professional website. Keep this block simple and easy to read.

The objective or summary is a short statement near the top of the résumé that tells the reader what kind of position you’re looking for (objective) or what you have to offer (summary). A summary is generally more useful than an objective because it focuses on what the employer will get, not on what you want. A good summary runs two or three sentences and identifies your strongest qualifications for the kind of role you’re seeking.

The experience section is where most of the action happens. Each entry should include the employer’s name, your job title, the dates of employment, and a short description of your responsibilities and—more importantly—your accomplishments. The distinction between responsibilities and accomplishments is the single most important move in résumé writing. Consider the difference between these two versions of the same job:

Responsibilities vs. Accomplishments

Version A (duties only):

Dolle Company, Inc. — Sales Associate, June 2018–August 2020

  • Worked with customers in the retail store
  • Operated the cash register
  • Stocked shelves and organized merchandise

Version B (accomplishments with results):

Dolle Company, Inc. — Sales Associate, June 2018–August 2020

  • Generated $82,000 in annual personal sales volume, ranking third out of fourteen associates in the store’s largest category
  • Redesigned the store’s point-of-sale training materials, reducing new-hire onboarding time from eight hours to five
  • Developed a weekend promotion program that increased Saturday foot traffic by 23 percent over a six-month period

Version B is the same job. The difference is that Version B tells the reader what actually happened as a result of the writer being in that job, while Version A just lists the tasks a sales associate typically performs. Every experienced résumé reviewer has seen ten thousand Version A’s. Version B is memorable because it tells a story about impact.[8][9]

The education section includes your degrees, the institutions where you earned them, and the dates. Include relevant coursework, honors, or a GPA if they strengthen your case. Recent graduates often place education before experience; mid-career professionals usually place experience first.

Additional sections you may include depending on your field and experience are skills (technical or language skills relevant to the position), certifications (professional credentials), publications (for academic or research positions), professional memberships, awards, and volunteer experience. Use them when they strengthen your story. Leave them out when they would just add noise.

Sample Formats

Below are abbreviated samples of the three most common résumé formats. Each one uses the same underlying information about a hypothetical candidate, reorganized to serve different rhetorical purposes.

Reverse Chronological Format (excerpt)

Experience

Osprey Coastal Survey, Rockland, ME — Junior Surveyor, May 2022–Present

  • Conducted multi-beam bathymetric surveys across fourteen Maine harbors, processing over 840 hours of raw sonar data
  • Coauthored eight client deliverables for municipal and state clients
  • Maintained vessel survey equipment with zero downtime-related project delays

Midcoast Marine Services, Boothbay Harbor, ME — Deckhand, Summer 2020 and 2021

  • Assisted with vessel operations on a forty-four-foot charter boat during peak season
  • Earned OUPV six-pack captain’s credential during fall 2021

Functional Format (excerpt)

Technical Skills

  • Hydrographic survey software (HYPACK, Caris HIPS/SIPS)
  • Multi-beam sonar operation and data processing
  • Vessel navigation and deck safety

Project Management Skills

  • Managed timelines and deliverables for eight municipal survey projects
  • Coordinated with vendor suppliers for equipment procurement
  • Prepared client progress reports and final deliverables

Communication Skills

  • Drafted client-facing project summaries and technical appendices
  • Presented survey results at two Maine Water Quality Association meetings

Scannable Format (excerpt)

JUNIOR HYDROGRAPHER

Certified in multi-beam bathymetric survey operations. Experienced in HYPACK, Caris HIPS/SIPS, and side-scan sonar processing. OUPV six-pack captain’s credential. Hydrographic Society of America member.

EXPERIENCE

Osprey Coastal Survey, Rockland ME. Junior Surveyor, 2022 to present. Conducted 840 hours of bathymetric survey operations. Coauthored 8 client deliverables. Zero equipment-related project delays.

Midcoast Marine Services, Boothbay Harbor ME. Deckhand, summers 2020 and 2021.

EDUCATION

Maine Maritime Academy. Bachelor of Science, Marine Science. 2022.

KEYWORDS: hydrography, bathymetry, HYPACK, Caris, multi-beam, side-scan, Maine, coastal, survey

The scannable version intentionally strips out formatting that might confuse an applicant tracking system. No bullet characters. No bold or italic. Keywords listed at the bottom to improve searchability. It is not pretty, but it parses cleanly—and that matters when a hiring manager’s first contact with your résumé is actually a software system scanning it for a match.

Real-World Application: The Six-Second Read

Studies of how hiring managers actually read résumés suggest that the initial review takes about six seconds. Six seconds. In that span, the reader’s eyes move to the candidate’s name, then the current or most recent job title, then the employer, then the dates, then the education section, and then—if the résumé has survived the first pass—the bullet points under the most recent job.

If your résumé cannot survive a six-second read, it is not surviving. The implication is clear: the top third of the page has to be dense with evidence that you fit the job. The most recent position has to be positioned and described so that a skimmer can see at a glance why you’re relevant. The bullet points have to lead with verbs and results, not with “responsible for” and “worked on.” And the résumé as a whole has to be laid out so that a reader scanning with half-attention can still extract the three or four facts that matter most.

This doesn’t mean your résumé should be shallow. It means the surface of your résumé has to do enough work that the reader decides to read more deeply.

Key Takeaways

  • A résumé is a concise summary of a candidate’s education, experience, and skills, written for a dual audience of human reviewers and applicant tracking systems.
  • The five common types of résumés are reverse chronological, functional, combination, targeted, and scannable, each suited to a different rhetorical situation.
  • Experience entries should emphasize accomplishments and results rather than job duties.
  • Effective résumés are designed to survive a six-second initial read and reward deeper reading once that initial read is complete.

Exercises

  1. Draft your own résumé in the reverse chronological format. Then rewrite the same material in the functional format. Which version tells a stronger story? Which would you submit for a job you really wanted, and why?
  2. Take a single experience entry from your draft résumé and rewrite each bullet point to emphasize results rather than duties. If you can’t quantify the result, try to characterize the outcome in some other way (faster, cleaner, more accurate).
  3. Find a job posting for a position you might realistically apply for. List the five most important keywords from the posting. Revise your résumé to include each of those keywords naturally in the experience or skills sections.
  4. Swap résumés with a classmate. Read theirs for six seconds and then look away. Write down what you remember. Tell them what they can do to make the first six seconds work harder.

9.6 Sales Message

Learning Objectives

  1. Define a sales message and describe its purpose in the sales process.
  2. Identify the five parts of a persuasive sales message and explain the function of each.
  3. Apply the principles of audience analysis, ethical persuasion, and call to action to writing an original sales message.
  4. Recognize the difference between a sales message that connects with the reader’s self-interest and one that simply lists product features.
  5. Draft a brief sales email that moves the reader from attention to action without sounding like every other sales email in the inbox.

Sales messages are among the most common documents written in business. Advertisements, promotional emails, direct-mail pieces, fundraising letters, product descriptions on websites, pitches on social media—all of these are sales messages in different clothing. Writing an effective sales message is a specialized skill because it demands that the writer do something most other business documents do not demand: convince a reader who hasn’t asked for anything to give up some of their attention, some of their time, and eventually some of their money.

Case Connection: The Aquaculture Message Althea Will Finally Send

The last document on Althea’s weekend list—the one she said would have to wait until Monday afternoon, after the proposal was shipped—was an outreach message to the shellfish aquaculture startups popping up along the Maine coast. The pitch was a new shallow-water mapping service Osprey was piloting: fast, cheap, small-boat-friendly, specifically designed for leaseholders who needed baseline bathymetric maps of their lease sites to track sediment changes over time. Althea had drafted the message three times and trashed it three times because every version sounded like every other marketing email the aquaculture founders were already deleting.

On Monday afternoon, after the MDOT proposal has shipped and the crew is back from Belfast Harbor and the flu is starting to move out of Marguerite’s system, Althea sits down at her desk and tries a different approach. She thinks about who is actually reading the message. A thirty-four-year-old oyster farmer working out of a converted mussel shack on the Damariscotta River, who has eight hours of phone calls and invoices to get through before dark, who opens her email during lunch on her phone with her other hand wrapped around a sandwich. The question isn’t what does Osprey want this person to know? The question is what would make this person not delete the email before the end of the second sentence?

This is the subject of the section you’re about to read.

The Sales Message

Sales messages are documents designed to persuade the reader to take a specific action: to buy a product, subscribe to a service, donate to a cause, or inquire about more information. Unlike a letter informing a customer of a shipping delay or a memo announcing a new policy, a sales message exists to move the reader from wherever they are to a specific next step the writer wants them to take.

The reader of a sales message is almost always busy. They did not wake up this morning hoping to read your email. They have their own problems, their own priorities, and their own inbox full of competing messages. A successful sales message takes that situation seriously. It doesn’t try to trick the reader into reading longer than they want to. It earns each sentence by making the previous one feel worth continuing past.

Persuasive sales messages are most effective when they are built around an understanding of the reader’s self-interest. The reader does not care what your product is. The reader cares what your product does—for them. A sales message that describes features is a sales message the reader skims. A sales message that describes outcomes is a sales message the reader remembers.

Five Parts of a Persuasive Message

Most effective sales messages, whether short or long, include five core elements. They may be called by different names in different textbooks, but the functions are consistent.

Table 9.6 — Five Parts of a Persuasive Message

  1. Establish credibility (attention statement). Open with something that earns the reader’s attention and establishes that the writer is worth listening to. This might be a surprising fact, a relevant question, a reference to a shared context, or an identification of a problem the reader is already thinking about.
  2. Introduction (the problem or need). Name the problem or need the message is addressing. Show the reader that the writer understands their situation well enough to have earned the next paragraph.
  3. Body (the solution). Present the product, service, or idea as a solution to the problem named in the introduction. Focus on outcomes and benefits, not on features and specifications.
  4. Call to action. State clearly and specifically what the writer wants the reader to do next. “Click here to learn more,” “Reply to this email by Friday,” “Call our office to schedule a free consultation.” A sales message without a specific call to action is a sales message that stops short of its purpose.
  5. Conclusion (residual message). End with a final impression designed to stay with the reader after they close the message. This is often a tagline, a brand promise, or a brief summary of why the proposition matters.

Notice that the five parts don’t correspond to paragraphs. A short sales email might handle all five parts in five sentences. A long sales letter might spend several paragraphs on each part. The parts are functions the message has to perform, not blocks it has to be built from.[10]

Sample Sales Message

Subject: Your car’s check-engine light just became a lot less terrifying

Dear Neighbor,

You know that sinking feeling when the check-engine light pops on and you start running through the list of things it could be? (Is it the timing belt? Is it the catalytic converter? Is it going to be eight hundred dollars?)

We started Auto Doctors because we got tired of watching our friends and family walk into repair shops and walk out with bills they didn’t understand. Our shop has a different policy. Before we touch anything on your car, we diagnose the problem, call you, and walk you through exactly what we found and what it will cost to fix. No surprises. No upsells. Just a straight explanation of what your car needs and what it doesn’t.

This month, we’re offering a free check-engine-light diagnostic for first-time customers. Bring in your car, get an honest assessment of what’s going on, and walk out knowing exactly what you’re dealing with—whether you fix it with us or somewhere else.

Call us at (555) 555-2468 to schedule your free diagnostic, or stop by the shop at 2200 Industrial Drive any weekday between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

At Auto Doctors, we treat your car the way we’d want someone to treat ours.

Sincerely,

Molly Mechanic
Owner, Auto Doctors
(555) 555-2468
molly@autodoctors.example

Molly’s sales message applies all five parts in a short email. The attention statement is the subject line and the opening paragraph, which identify a problem the reader has almost certainly experienced. The introduction names the problem explicitly (unclear repair costs). The body offers the solution (transparent diagnostics and pricing) and the specific offer (free check-engine diagnostic). The call to action is concrete and specific (call this number, or visit this address, at these times). The residual message is the tagline, which captures the brand promise in a single sentence.

Notice what Molly’s message does not do. It does not list the technical specifications of her diagnostic equipment. It does not explain her mechanic-school credentials. It does not spend three paragraphs talking about her years of experience. All of those might matter to some readers, but the reader of this email is a busy person with a check-engine light on their dashboard, and what they want to know is whether Auto Doctors is going to solve the problem without ripping them off. Molly’s message answers that question and then gets out of the way.

Pro Tip: Write to One Person, Not to a List

One of the most common weaknesses of sales messages is that they’re written to a mailing list rather than to a person. The writer has a spreadsheet of five hundred names in mind, and it shows in the prose. “Our valued customers” is the giveaway: nobody describes themselves as one of our valued customers, so the phrase never lands on a real reader.

The fix is to pick a specific person—a real customer, a composite, or an imaginary representative of the audience—and write the entire message to that one person. Use “you,” not “our customers.” Reference details that person would recognize. Ask questions that person would actually be asking. A sales message written to one reader will feel personal to every reader. A sales message written to a list will feel like spam to every reader.

Ethical Consideration: Persuasion Is Not Manipulation

Sales writing lives on the edge of a line that’s easy to cross. On one side of the line is persuasion: making the case, honestly, that the reader’s situation would improve if they took the action you’re proposing. On the other side is manipulation: exploiting the reader’s emotions, fears, or cognitive shortcuts to get them to take an action that isn’t actually in their interest.

The easiest test is the reciprocity test. If you were the reader instead of the writer, would you still want to receive the message? If the answer is yes—if you’d open it, read it, and feel that the writer had respected your time and your intelligence—you’re on the right side of the line. If the answer is no, rewrite the message. The short-term gains of a manipulative sales message are never worth the long-term cost to your reputation and your organization’s brand.

The other reason to stay on the right side of the line is that readers are getting more sophisticated all the time. The reader who falls for a manipulative message in 2026 is a reader who will never open another message from you again.

Key Takeaways

  • Sales messages persuade the reader to take a specific action: buy, subscribe, donate, or inquire.
  • Effective sales messages lead with the reader’s self-interest and describe outcomes rather than features.
  • Most successful sales messages include five parts: attention statement, introduction of the problem, body presenting the solution, specific call to action, and residual message.
  • Writing to one reader rather than to a list produces sales messages that feel personal and land.
  • Persuasion is a partner to ethics, not a substitute for it.

Exercises

  1. Find three sales emails in your own inbox (or spam folder). Analyze them using the five parts in Table 9.6. Which parts does each email do well? Which parts does each email skip or fumble? Which email would you actually respond to, and why?
  2. Draft a one-page sales message for a product or service you know well. Apply all five parts. Have a classmate read it and identify the five parts in your draft. If they can’t find one, rewrite.
  3. Rewrite Molly Mechanic’s Auto Doctors email three times: once for a reader who cares about price above everything, once for a reader who cares about speed and convenience, and once for a reader who cares about environmental and ethical sourcing. What changes? What stays the same?
  4. Write Althea’s shallow-water mapping outreach message to the Damariscotta River oyster farmer. You have one screen of space (no scrolling on a phone). The farmer has eight hours of work to do before dark and is eating a sandwich with her other hand. Every word has to earn its place.

Closing Case Analysis: The Monday Morning Handoff

At 7:14 Monday morning, Althea walked into the Tillson Avenue office with two thermoses of coffee, a binder labeled MDOT RFP Response—Final, and the strange quiet that comes from having been awake for most of a forty-eight-hour stretch. The six Osprey employees were already there for the 6:30 a.m. safety review that her Saturday memo had called. Ziyad was at the coffee pot. Marguerite was on the couch in the break area, pale but upright, holding a tissue box. Oriol was at the whiteboard. The memo Althea had written forty-six hours earlier was taped to the whiteboard beside a hand-drawn diagram of the davit.

Althea walked Oriol through the week’s work in the order she’d done it. The text to Ziyad had gone out Friday night at 7:14 p.m.: four lines, confirming the Belfast job, noting the safety review, and closing with “see you there—get some sleep.” Ziyad had replied within ninety seconds with a thumbs up. The memo had gone out Saturday morning at 9:03 a.m. to all six employees, subject line “Friday davit incident and Monday safety review,” body running 187 words and following Ogawa’s sample closely: main point first, scannable list of what had happened, concrete next step for the crew, contact for questions. The letter to the Penobscot Yacht Club board had printed on letterhead Saturday at 10:40 a.m., been signed by Oriol at 11:15, and been dropped in the Saturday afternoon mail pickup at the Rockland post office with Althea watching the postal worker seal the bag. The email to Bellweather Marine Supply had gone out Saturday at 1:22 p.m., acknowledged by Bellweather at 2:41 p.m., and been followed at 3:15 p.m. by a tracking number showing the transducer had actually shipped. The MDOT proposal had compiled through Saturday night and Sunday, with the executive summary being written from 9:30 to 10:10 p.m. Saturday, the budget finalized Sunday morning, the methodology section edited through Sunday afternoon, and the whole 38-page response uploaded to the MDOT portal at 4:47 a.m. Monday, three hours and thirteen minutes before the deadline. The quarterly report had been drafted Sunday evening and would go to Oriol and the two silent partners by the end of the week. The résumé from Flavia Knutson-Ekwueme had been reviewed Sunday morning with a recommendation to interview. The aquaculture sales message was still a draft and would go out Monday afternoon.

Oriol listened to all of this standing next to the whiteboard, holding the coffee Althea had handed him, not saying anything. When she finished, he looked at the memo taped to the whiteboard and said, “You picked the right form every time.”

Althea said, “The hardest one wasn’t the proposal.”

“No?”

“The letter to Penobscot. I had to write a professional document to people who had just fired us. Everything about the relationship was broken. Everything about the format said we still wanted to treat them like partners. The gap between those two things was the hardest thing I wrote all weekend.”

Oriol nodded. “The letter is the one nobody teaches you. The proposal is the one everybody makes a big deal about, because the money is visible. But the letter is the one that tells you whether the person writing it understands the difference between a relationship and a transaction.”

Let’s use this closing to pull what you’ve learned in this chapter into a working analysis of the weekend. Althea’s tasks map cleanly onto the six content sections of the chapter, and her choices reveal how those sections work in practice.

Her text to Ziyad applied the texting principles from Section 9.1. It was short. It was clear. It anticipated his questions. It acknowledged that he was a young employee worried about his standing, and it addressed him as a trusted member of the crew without wasting words on reassurance that would have felt performative. The four lines did four things at once: confirmed the Monday job, set the safety-review time, conveyed warmth, and ended with a small personal moment (“get some sleep”). The thirty-five words took Althea about forty seconds to write, and they went out before anything else because the smallest piece of writing on her list had the most time-sensitive effect.

Her email to Bellweather Marine Supply was a masterclass in the email principles from Section 9.1 combined with the netiquette rules about tone and power dynamics. The subject line was specific (“Transducer order #4419—shipping status needed by Monday 8 a.m.”), the opening sentence stated the purpose immediately, the body laid out the facts of what had been promised and when, the tone was firm but not hostile, the close stated exactly what Althea was asking for (a tracking number by end of business Saturday), and the signature block carried Althea’s full title and contact information so the email was forwardable inside Bellweather’s organization. She reread it three times before sending, checking for anything that would make the message harder for Bellweather to act on without losing face. Everything about that email was in Section 9.1.

Her memo about the davit incident applied all five memo principles from Section 9.2. Audience orientation: the memo was written for the crew, not for a lawyer or an insurer, and it used the crew’s vocabulary without acronyms that would have confused a newer employee. Professional, formal tone: Althea resisted the temptation to write the memo conversationally and kept it at the level of official organizational communication. Subject emphasis: the subject line identified both the incident and the safety review in one scannable phrase. Direct format: the main point—what happened and what the crew should do about it—appeared in the first sentence. Objectivity: Althea did not speculate about the cause, did not assign blame, and did not editorialize, even though she had opinions. The memo was doing the job of an organizational safety document, and it had to be able to function as that document if anyone ever needed it to.

Her letter to the Penobscot Yacht Club board applied the fifteen elements from Table 9.1 and the memo-vs-letter distinction from Section 9.2. The letter was printed on Osprey letterhead. The return address was in the header. The date was current. The inside address named every board member by name and position. The salutation was formal. The opening paragraph acknowledged the board’s October decision without arguing with it. The body expressed appreciation for the relationship and acknowledged the specific reasons the board had cited for ending the contract, without getting defensive about any of them. The closing left the door open: “We wish the board every success with your future survey partners, and hope we have an opportunity to serve the club again in the future.” The close, the signature (Oriol’s), and the cc line all did their work quietly. The letter was a model of how form itself communicates meaning: the formality said we are taking this seriously, and the specific gestures inside the formality said we are hoping the door is not closed forever.

Her MDOT RFP response drew on everything in Section 9.3. It was a solicited proposal responding to a specific set of scoring criteria MDOT had published in the RFP. Its executive summary argued for Osprey’s approach in a single page, using the ethos of past performance, the pathos of understanding MDOT’s challenges with harbor silt management, and the logos of a clean methodology and realistic budget. Its methodology section walked through the survey approach step by step. Its team qualifications named Marguerite, Ziyad, and (pending) Flavia, with a short paragraph on each. Its schedule used a Gantt chart. Its budget showed line items rather than a single lump-sum number. Its past performance section cited three comparable harbor surveys Osprey had completed in the previous eighteen months. The call to action closed with the next step and a named contact. The document did not win the contract by itself—that decision was still ahead—but it represented Osprey the way Osprey actually was, which was the most a proposal could do.

Her quarterly operating report drew on Section 9.4. It was an informational report for Oriol and the partners, but it included a short analytical section at the end where Althea interpreted the Q3 numbers and flagged the two trends she thought the partners should watch: labor utilization was down two percentage points from Q2, and accounts receivable were aging (a third of outstanding invoices were over sixty days). The report opened with a one-paragraph executive summary stating the top-line numbers. The findings section was organized by revenue category. The discussion named the two trends and explained them. The conclusions were brief. The recommendations were specific: “We should increase the frequency of collections calls on the over-sixty invoices, and we should review the crew scheduling process to identify the cause of the utilization drop.” Appendices carried the raw tables.

Her review of Flavia’s résumé drew on Section 9.5. Althea read the résumé twice: once in the six-second mode to see whether the top third of the page made the case, and once in careful mode to check the dates, the certifications, and the impact claims in the experience entries. She noted that Flavia had used a reverse chronological format with scannable formatting and that the experience entries emphasized accomplishments and results (kilometers surveyed, error-budget reductions, client deliverables) rather than job duties. She forwarded the résumé to Oriol with her one-line recommendation and a two-sentence summary of why she thought Flavia was worth the time of an interview.

And her aquaculture outreach message, still unfinished on Monday morning but scheduled for Monday afternoon, would draw on everything in Section 9.6. Attention statement identifying a pain point the oyster farmers were actually feeling (state reporting requirements for lease boundary changes). Introduction of the problem. Body presenting Osprey’s new shallow-water mapping service as a solution. Call to action: a free half-day pilot survey for the first three farms to sign up. Residual message: a tagline she had been circling around for weeks and had not yet found the words for.

By 7:40 Monday morning the staff meeting had wrapped up. The Belfast crew was loading the van. Marguerite was going home to sleep off the last of the flu. Oriol was heading down to the dock to oversee the davit repair. Althea sat alone in the office with her coffee and her thermos and the eight headings on her legal pad—all eight of them now with a small check mark beside them, except for the aquaculture message, which still had the word draft beside it and which she was going to come back to after lunch.

None of the documents had been elegant. Several of them had been written at speeds that would have made her graduate-school writing teachers wince. But all of them had been the right form for the right audience for the right purpose, and all of them had left Osprey in a better position Monday morning than Osprey had been in Friday night. That was what the weekend had actually been about. Not elegance. Not art. Just picking the right form every time and writing each form competently enough that it did its job.

Oriol had been right about one thing. Every one of them was a different kind of writing. And by Monday morning, Althea understood—in a way she had not understood on Friday night—why knowing the difference was the whole skill.

End-of-Chapter Review

Review Questions

  1. What are the five tips for effective memo writing, and how did Althea apply each one in the shackle-incident memo?
  2. Identify the fifteen elements of a business letter from Table 9.1. Which elements did the sample Paige Turner letter include, and which did it leave out?
  3. What is the difference between a solicited and an unsolicited proposal? Give one example of each.
  4. What is the difference between an informational report and an analytical report? Give one example of each from the case study.
  5. List the five types of résumés covered in Section 9.5. When might you pick each one?
  6. What are the five parts of a persuasive sales message? Which part is the most commonly skipped, and what happens when a writer skips it?
  7. What are three of Virginia Shea’s ten rules of netiquette? Give an example of each from your own experience.
  8. Why did Althea describe the letter to the Penobscot Yacht Club board as “the hardest thing I wrote all weekend”? What was hard about it in terms of form and audience?
  9. How do ethos, pathos, and logos work together in the opening paragraph of a business proposal?
  10. What is the “six-second read” and what does it imply for how you design the top third of a résumé?

Matching Exercise: Forms and Functions

Match each written form on the left with its primary function on the right. Some functions may apply to more than one form.

Forms

  1. Text message
  2. Email
  3. Memo
  4. Letter
  5. Solicited proposal
  6. Unsolicited proposal
  7. Informational report
  8. Analytical report
  9. Reverse chronological résumé
  10. Functional résumé
  11. Scannable résumé
  12. Targeted résumé
  13. Sales email
  14. Executive summary

Functions

  • a. Argues for a specific action in response to a published RFP
  • b. Highlights skills over job titles; useful for career changers
  • c. Communicates quickly with a coworker who has to act within minutes
  • d. Condenses a long document into one page that can stand on its own
  • e. Represents an organization formally to an outside party
  • f. Records facts without interpretation
  • g. Formatted for applicant tracking systems with minimal formatting
  • h. Persuades a reader to take a specific action, usually a purchase
  • i. Customized to mirror the language of a specific job posting
  • j. Communicates policy or procedure inside an organization
  • k. Presents information with comprehensive analysis and recommendations
  • l. Lists employment history with most recent position first
  • m. Introduces a problem the reader has not yet recognized, along with a solution
  • n. Hybrid of a text and a letter, archived as a record, often forwarded

Answer Key: 1-c, 2-n, 3-j, 4-e, 5-a, 6-m, 7-f, 8-k, 9-l, 10-b, 11-g, 12-i, 13-h, 14-d

Application Exercises

  1. Pick any two of Althea’s eight documents and rewrite them from scratch using what you’ve learned in this chapter. Have a classmate compare your versions to the description of Althea’s in the closing case analysis.
  2. You are a recent graduate applying for your first full-time job. Prepare a résumé in the reverse chronological format, a cover letter, and a one-paragraph sales pitch for yourself that you could use in an elevator conversation. Exchange all three documents with a classmate for feedback.
  3. Interview a professional in a field you’re interested in. Ask them to describe the eight document types covered in this chapter and share the one they find hardest to write. Summarize your findings in a two-page report using the common elements from Section 9.4.
  4. Draft an unsolicited proposal to improve something at your school or workplace. Keep it to one page. Apply the ethos-pathos-logos framework from Section 9.3.
  5. Take a piece of sales email you received recently that you deleted without reading. Rewrite it using the five parts from Section 9.6 so that you would not have deleted it. What changed?

Discussion Questions

  1. Oriol tells Althea, “Every one of those things is a different kind of writing.” Do you agree? Are there moments when a text and a memo might actually be the same form in different clothes? Defend your answer.
  2. Which of the eight documents Althea wrote over the weekend would you have found hardest? Why? What does your answer reveal about your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?
  3. The closing case suggests that the letter to the Penobscot Yacht Club board was the hardest document because the relationship and the format were pulling against each other. Can you think of a situation in your own life where you had to write something formal to someone whose relationship with you had just broken? How did you handle it?
  4. Sales messages walk a line between persuasion and manipulation. Where do you think the line actually is? Is the test the reader’s reaction or the writer’s intent?
  5. If applicant tracking systems now read résumés before humans do, has the résumé become a document written primarily for machines? What does that do to the writer’s voice, and is the tradeoff worth it?

Extended Project: The Osprey Weekend

This multi-part project asks you to step into Althea’s shoes for a compressed version of her weekend. Over the course of two class sessions (or one week out of class), produce the following four documents for Osprey Coastal Survey:

  1. Shackle-incident memo to all six Osprey employees, using the five memo principles in Section 9.2. 200 words maximum.
  2. Letter to the Penobscot Yacht Club board acknowledging their contract termination, using at least ten of the fifteen elements in Table 9.1. One page.
  3. One-page executive summary of Osprey’s MDOT RFP response, applying the ethos-pathos-logos framework in Section 9.3. The executive summary should stand alone if the rest of the proposal is never read.
  4. Shallow-water mapping outreach email to Damariscotta-area oyster farmers, applying all five parts of a persuasive message in Section 9.6. One screen of text.

Deliverables: a single compiled PDF containing all four documents, plus a one-page reflection memo explaining which document was hardest to write, why, and what you did about it. Be prepared to share your reflection memo in class.

Self-Assessment: Revisiting the Before You Read Questions

Go back to the five questions you answered before reading the chapter. Look at what you wrote then. Now answer each question again, using what you’ve learned in the chapter. Compare the two sets of answers and write one paragraph reflecting on what changed.

  1. The one-sentence definitions of each of the eight forms: which definitions held up? Which did you need to revise most? What does that tell you about which forms you already understood and which ones you didn’t?
  2. Your formal-to-informal ranking: how does the ranking look now? In particular, where did you put the email, and do you still think it belongs there? Business email sits in a stranger formal-informal zone than most writers assume.
  3. The text or email you last sent at work: would you send it the same way now, after reading Section 9.1? What would you change?
  4. The most important element of a business letter: compare your pre-reading answer to your post-reading answer. Most readers find that the element they picked before reading the chapter is not the element they pick after reading Table 9.1. Why might that be?
  5. Your confidence number about writing a one-page sales email: has it moved? If it went up, what gave you the confidence? If it went down, what revealed that you had more to learn than you realized?

Finally: identify the one form from this chapter you most need to practice. Write one sentence about how you will practice it this week.

9.7 Additional Resources

Visit the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) for detailed guidance on business letters. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/653/01/

The Riley Guide is a comprehensive online resource for job searching, résumés, and cover letters. http://www.rileyguide.com

Read about netiquette at Virginia Shea’s original site. http://www.albion.com/netiquette/

Visit the U.S. Small Business Administration for guidance on writing business plans and proposals. http://www.sba.gov

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  4. Shea, V. (1994). Netiquette. San Francisco, CA: Albion Books. ↵
  5. Bennett, J. C. (2005). The elements of resume style: Essential rules and eye-opening advice for writing resumes and cover letters that work. New York, NY: AMACOM. ↵
  6. Baugh, L. S., & Hamper, R. J. (1995). Handbook for writing proposals. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. ↵
  7. Simons, T., & Curtis, T. (2004). The new resume: How to find your next job. New York, NY: Barron's Educational Series. ↵
  8. Riley, M. (n.d.). The Riley guide: Job searching online. Retrieved from http://www.rileyguide.com ↵
  9. Price, J. A. (n.d.). Job interviews, resumes, and networking tips. Retrieved from http://www.jobinterviewadvice.blogspot.com ↵
  10. Winston, W., & Granat, J. (1997). Persuasive advertising for entrepreneurs and small business owners: How to create more effective sales messages. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press. ↵

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