From a very young age, we are taught how to write letters to one another. We are taught structure and the etiquette in writing a letter to a friend or family member. But little of that is retained, I’ve found, when writing letters to CIOs.
While writing up templates and drafts of this letter that we plan of sending to a variety of CIOs in order to prepare their teams for our future plans, I found that the foundation of writing a letter that we learned so long ago is mostly similar (greeting, body, signature), but there are many things that must be done differently.
For example, when we are taught how to write an amicable letter, we often make small talk, detailing many different aspects for the reader. Even a regular business-type letter is somewhat insufficient for a higher-level audience that you might write to, like the CIOs. This is because, being that CIOs have a large amount of people under them, they have very busy schedules to tend to, and a long email, detailing every aspect of your project or request will easily get over-looked. So, when writing to them, you must pack as much information in as little amount of words and space as possible. If you think you get a lot of emails, imagine what their inbox is like. So for this purpose and functionality, you must learn how to make these types of letters and emails concise.
In learning this lesson, I have started to develop, what I think, are good skills for writing whatever type of email that my job may require me to write. You aren’t always required to tell the recipient of your email your entire life story, or exactly how this project started, or every detail of a step they must take. Sometimes, that may be necessary, but it is part of being in a work environment and learning when it is more appropriate to be specific, and when it is appropriate to be a little vague. You can eventually get readings on which projects or tasks people know more about in the office, and which are lesser known or require more description.
By writing these templates, I feel that it has helped me refine those writing skills and better understand the knowledge of the office and being about to realize who needs what information, and how much they need. It’s a skill that will change from office to office, and one that can always be perfected on, but it is definitely something, I believe, you need in order to function properly within the work environment these days. It’s a great skill to have and one that I think will help benefit me in both my internship as well as the real world, no matter where I end up.
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You provide some important analysis here, Adrienne. You're clearly using rhetorical analysis as an inventional strategy here, as you consider who your audience is and how that audience's specific context affects your decisions about what to say and how to say. I'd like to hear you describe/analyze a specific letter in more detail, if you could, both here and especially in the portfolio. In short, I'd like to hear you describe some of the specific decisions that you make in order to ensure you're creating and sending a concise text. What do you include, what do you exclude, and why? What does an early draft look like, and what revisions do you make in order to ensure you're best meeting the audience's needs? And as you analyze the text, also keep these considerations in mind:
ReplyDelete-what's the audience's specific purpose in reading the text?
-what's your purpose in writing the text? That is, what specifically do you want to accomplish? Or, what specifically do you want the audience to do after reading/as they read your letter?
How your answers to these questions shape your decisions about what information to include and exclude? How to arrange the material that you do include? What style in which to write?