Buesiness Letter, Draft 1

Date:   August 30^th, 2011

To:       Richard Brockmeyer, Director of Plant Operations

From:   Ian Coppock

Subject: URGENT

Hello Richard. My name is Ian Coppock and I’m a mail sorter working out of the campus post office. I and my coworkers need your expertise in a problem that’s arisen in the post office.

Yesterday evening, one of the mail room’s three industrial copiers suffered a malfunction and no longer works. Jessica Lind, my coworker, has inspected the machine and believes that an internal mechanical failure has caused it to shut down. At optimal capacity, the copier can produce 200 copies in one hour, or about a third of our total potential output. Without the copier, our capacity to produce print jobs efficiently will suffer, resulting in a marked breakdown in communication and education efficiency across campus. I’ve met with my coworkers to procure a solution to this problem, and we brainstormed a few potential solutions that we’d like to share with you.

After speaking with a representative from Xerox, we’ve learned that simply repairing the copier will cost roughly $300 and take approximately two days of time. While this is the cheapest solution, we’ve also agreed that this machine is aging. Replacing it with a new copier will, in the long run, prove the better solution. While a new copier’s $4,000 price tag is admittedly high, it is able to print 300 copies in one hour, upgrading our capacity to maintain efficient campus-wide communications by 30%. This morning I floated this idea to a maintenance manager, who also agreed that getting a copier might be the more efficient solution.

I appreciate your taking the time to read my message and contemplate our ideas. Please respond to this message quickly, and we will make all efforts to implement your decision and make this portion of plant operations running at top efficiency once again. Thank you for your time.

I corresponded with the Xerox mechanic and the Xerox salesman by email. I’ve attached the transcripts of both conversations below, for your convenience.

 

           

Audience Analysis

My primary audience is the manager of Westminster's Plant Operations. This man has a great deal of responsibility regarding maintenance and keeping college technology efficient. Plant Operations also extends tendrils of labor into event planning and engineering.

I've met the manager twice, and on both occasions he was polite and interested in my background as an employee of Plant Ops (I'm a mail room worker). My supervisor, Karen, enjoys frequent visits from the manager, who arrives to see how we're all doing as well as evaluate the efficiency of our office. He is concerned with both arenas of the greater work environment: employee satisfaction and office efficiency. He's managed plant operations long enough to know that both are crucial to a successful office.

My manager would likely read the email under fairly busy circumstances. He checks into the office every weekday morning and immediately sets about reading emails, returning calls, and listening to concerns and reports that are voiced by his immediate staff. However, he knows an urgent situation when he sees one, and that maintaining efficient communication and supply of materials across campus is one of his chief concerns. He would likely single out this message on his own and respond to it quickly, but I still need to insure that it presents both logic and urgency in one package.

My Response To "How to Email a Professor" by Michael Leddy

I agree with Dr. Liddy that it is important to keep an email professional and easy to maneuver. I've been told more than once by past professors that it's difficult to discern a student from a university email address, especially when the subject line is something general, like "Question about an Assignment". It is, I concede, far easier to write a more specific question, such as "Question about Comm 301 Assignment". Being polite and professional to a professor are obvious musts.

There is one point, however, that I respectively disagree with. I think that the presence of generous formality can be a liability rather than an asset. It is important to treat a professor with respect, but using too much formality can make it seem as though you're submissive to him or her. Most professors I know prefer a student-mentor relationship in which both parties can be open and reasonably informal, as it creates a speaking environment conducive to honesty and friendship, rather than just the give-and-take of assignments and related information. I suggest that Dr. Leddy's advice solely take the form of addressing a professor politely and professionally, without all of the cumbersome formality that can so segregate a student from his or her mentor. In Dr. Leddy's defense, the preference is, at the very least, subjective, but in my two years of college I've yet to meet a professor who preferred to be addressed as "Hello, Dr. Last Name" rather than simply "Hey, First Name. Hope things are going well!".

Book Bio

Ian Coppock was raised in northern Utah, where he began writing Accolade and other fiction material when he was nine. An avid gamer, Ian also became interested in video game story writing shortly after his arrival to Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he is currently studying professional writing. He divides his time between writing books, writing video games, reading books, and playing video games. Ian lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.