ENGL 3140 – Final Exam
Conduct a comprehensive edit of the memo below. Assess the content (whether it meets the needs of its audience), style, organization, visual design, and opportunities for illustration of the document. Save your working copy as LASTNAME_Final.doc on the desktop.
Your edit should consist of two parts.
Part I
The first part is a 200- to 400-word analysis of the document. The analysis should evaluate how well the document addresses the needs of the reader with regard to the content, style, organization, and visual design of the document. If you think that illustrations or other graphics such as tables would be useful, include this information in your analysis. Along with the evaluation, suggest steps that the author could take to improve the document in each of the areas mentioned above. Be specific.
Part II
The second part is the actual editing of the text itself. Make the changes that you suggest in your analysis and correct misspellings, typos, grammatical errors, formatting inconsistencies etc. Edit the document on your computer. Be sure the “track changes” option is ON. You may use the highlighting function or commenting function if you choose.
When you complete the exam print it out and submit it to me.
Context and Audience
This memo is written to the employees of the Martimus Corporation, and it is from the Vice President of Martimus Corporation, T. J. Mueller. Mr. Mueller asked you to conduct a comprehensive edit of this memo. He specifically requested that you focus on clarity, organization, and presentation (visual design). The audience is busy and does not have time to search for information.
This memo will be emailed out to the recipients this afternoon.
Martimus Corporation
Interoffice Memorandum
Date: April 28, 2008
To: All Staff
From: T. J. Mueller, Vice President for Development (TJM)
Re: PROOF READING
Its absolutely critical that all members of the staff carefully proofread all communications they write. Last moth, we leaned that a proposal we had submitted to the US Department of Transportation was turned down largely because is was full of careless errors. One of the referees at the Department commented that, “We could scarcely trust an important contract to a company that cann’t proofread it’s proposals any better than this. Errors abound.”
We received similar comments on final report of the technology project, “Technology Improvements for boise”, we preformed last year for Boise General.
In response to this widespread problem at Martinus, we are the taking three important steps described below.
I. TRAINING COARSE
We have hired a private consulting form to conduct a 3-hour training course in editing and proofreading for all staff members. The course will be given 15 times so that the class size will be held to twelve participants. Nest week you will be asked to indicates times you can attend. Every effort will be made to accommodate you schedule.
II. ADDITIONAL REVIEWING
To assure that we never again send a letter, report, memorandum, or or other communication outside the company that will embarrass us with it’s carelessness we a re establishing an additional step in out review procedures. Four each communication which must pass through the regular review process, an additional step will be required. In this step, an appropriate person in each department will scour the communication for errors of expression, consistency, and correctness.
III. WRITING PERCORMANCE TO BE EVALUATED
In addition, we are creating new personnel evaluation forms to be used during annual salary reviews. They include a place for evaluating each employees’ writing.
III Conclusion
We at Martimus can overcome this problem with only the full cooperation of ever employee. Please help.