Reports and other longer documents
The term report is all encompassing way of referring to documents that can have many different functions.
Technical writings usually take on characteristics that are either formal or informal in nature.
The setup of a formal memo generally consist of an abstract, a table of contents, a glossary, an introduction, a detailed discussion of the topic, a conclusion, and recommendations, plus attachments.
Informal documents don’t tend to be as restrained and follow as many guidelines as their more formal counterparts.
Writers should be careful to plan their reports with care from the beginning so that it sticks to its intended purpose.
Reports require writers to pay attention to their audience and write in a way that will be understandable to them.
Proposals are in ways special reports that persuade a person to do something.
Mathes and Stevenson focus on the importance of audience analysis.
Robert Dodge wrote a report that showed the reading habits of busy managers, he concluded that they rarely read the body of the report, but tend to favor the introduction and the conclusion.

Every communication study involves 3 components, a writer, a message, and an audience.
According to Stevenson and Mathes it is important remember the following when you’re inexperienced:
1) It is false to assume that the person addressed is the audience
2) It is false to assume that the audience is a group of specialist in the field
3) It is false to assume that the report has a finite period of use
4) It is false to assume that the author and the audience always will be available for reference
5) It is false to assume that the audience is familiar with the assignment
6) It is false to assume that the audience has been involved in daily discussions of the material
7) It is false to assume that the audience awaits the report
8) It is false to assume that the audience has time to read the report
It is important to understand as a writer that your audience poses a problem
Once you realize this you have to understand your audience in order to know how to solve the problem
Three types of audiences exist:
1) Horizontal: exist on each level
2) Vertical: exist between levels
3) External: exist when any unit interacts with a separate organization
Writers view is always relative because he is in “the system”
Egocentric Organization Charts identifies specific individuals rather than complex organizational units, it also categorizes people in terms of their proximity to the writer.
Trace the communication routes of the reports that you write.
The final step in the method is to assign priorities to your audiences.
Primary: people who make decisions or act on the basis of the information a report contains
Secondary: people who are affected by the decisions and actions
Immediate: people who route the report or transmit the information it contains
The immediate audiences for a report are those persons who route the report or transmit the information it contains.
At times the immediate audience is also part of the primary audience.
The Matrix for Audience Analysis is a convenient device for characterizing and classifying your readers once you have identified them.
The question of “What does management want in reports?” is a basic question in the business world that is often ignored.
Management wants to know
1) What’s the report about and who wrote it?
2) What does it contribute?
3) What are the conclusion and recommendations?
4) What are their importance and significance?
5) What’s the implication to the company?
6) What actions are suggested?
If a summary is to convey information effectively it should have three types of facts:
1) What the report is about.
2) The significance and implications of the work.
3) The action called for.
Most managers will not read the body of the text; they tend to favor introductions and conclusions that get the point across faster.
Thos that do actually read the body of the report said they did so because:
1) Especially interested in the subject.
2) Deeply involved in the project.
3) Urgency of the problem requires it.
4) Skeptical of the conclusion that were drawn.
Report studies show that managers tend to be interested in five broad areas.
1) Technical problems
2) New projects and products
3) Experiments and test
4) Materials and processes
5) Field troubles
Management has a number of responsibilities in the writing process, they are:
1) Define the project and the required reports
2) Provide proper perspective for the project and the required reporting
3) See that effective reports are submitted on time
4) See that the reports are properly distributed
An abstract is an extremely important document; it can either make or break your case that you’re pleading to management.
Despite this level of importance these documents are often thrown together in a very short amount of time due to their short nature.
They serve two main functions:
1) It provides the specialist in the field with enough information about the report to permit him to decide whether he should read it.
2) It provides the administrator or executive with knowledge about what has been done in the study or project.
In all forms of communication it is importance to never ignore your audience.
A simple method of making sure you remember your audience is to ask Who? Why? And How?
Nothing turns a reader off faster than writing to impress, do not talk down to them.
Reports should be aimed at a specific audience and not designed to talk to a large group of people.
Make sure that you are consistent with things such as measurements and that you don’t switch units frequently.
Many people in more advanced education fields have developed a need to over qualify their reports, make sure that you stay away from this.
Make sure to allow yourself enough time to rewrite and perfect your work.

The Bridge Student Ministries
Officer Manual and Website Proposal
Jerry Nation












Executive Summary
This is an executive summary to show why The Bridge Student Ministries is in need of more organization and ways of keeping things consistent from year to year. One of the most prevalent problems faced by student organizations is inconsistent leadership over changing semesters. As one group of students moves on from their college life and begins their career a new group of students must assume the leadership roles for the organization. In some cases they have had enough time to adapt and learn the ways of the organization so that it can continue to function, but in many instances it becomes important for them to have a knowledge base on how to deal with situations that may not arise on a regular basis that they may not have had cause to observe before. If such a situation arises then they would have no way of knowing how to deal with this. My proposal therefore is to create a manual that will demonstrate to officers how the affairs of the club will be run and maintained.
The Bridge Student Ministries is a new organization so none of this material has been collected or documented to date. There are a few loosely followed policies that demonstrate how to do certain aspects of the group’s business, but these have not been documented and as of this point in time would largely be lost if the current leadership were to leave without passing on this knowledge.
The manual will take on a number of different parts:
1) Organization constitution
2) Mission statement
3) Description of officer roles
4) Code of conduct for officers and group members
5) Financial management
6) Meeting structure
With these areas clearly outlined it will ensure that the essence of what the organization is remains true throughout the course of its existence. It will also lead to an ease of transition from one group of leadership to the next. The possibility of an entirely new leadership in one year is small, but possible, more than likely there will be at least one underclassman that remains in a leadership position after the upperclassmen leave. However since elections will be held for the officer positions it will ultimately come down to chance and if there is not anyone left that has led the club in the past, then this manual will be indispensable.









Proposal for Manual
The organization already has a drafted constitution that has floated around from one current member to the next. One of the first steps in assembling a helpful manual will be to locate this constitution and include it in the final manual. After the constitution is in place it will be important for the purposes of this document to list what the mission statement for the organization is. To my knowledge this has not yet been drawn up and will need to be made by either myself or another member of the organization so that it may be included.
Once this first section of the manual is complete I will then add a section that describes in detail what each of the four officer roles will be:
President: Overall in charge, will be responsible for keeping officers on task and for making sure that meetings flow well. This will include but not be limited to setting up speakers for the weekly meetings and making sure that there is an area where the group can meet on campus.
Vice President: Will be in charge of getting the word out about the organization and making sure that there is a growing level of attendance at the meetings on campus.
Treasurer: There will be membership dues and donations for eventual mission trips that need to be managed and made sure that they are secure; this person will be in charge of this area of the organization. This will be accomplished also through the use of an organization bank account at Bank of America.
Secretary: This person must be at every meeting and will be responsible for taking down the meeting minutes and keeping the other paper work of the organization organized.
All of these positions will more than likely have more responsibilities that will be added throughout the course of this project as I find out more and more of what the organizations pastoral advisor is looking for from each of these positions. While he may want to leave these positions loosely defined so that the group has more room to change, I feel that the preference will be for a more structured and fixed in stone organization that runs without as much interjection on his behalf.
The manual will include a section that shows how not only the officers, but the general members should conduct themselves when having dealings with the organization. As a ministry outlook, it is important that he group keep a certain appearance for the public.
Finally the manual will include some form of basic structure for how meetings will be setup. This will not be a guide to show exactly how it must be done every week, but rather will be there to help new members and officers have a jumping off point to help the meeting flow better.

Harty 115-167

Business and technical correspondence take on three forms; the letter, the memo, and now e-mail. Letters were commonly used to convey information to people outside of the company, while memos were used to do this inside. The invention of email acted to make these two forms slightly outdated, unfortunately this has led for some people to become sloppy with their writing styles due to the ease that these methods can be used. This can lead to a host of public relations problems due to messages being misinterpreted, or being too blunt.
When sending emails to people outside the company that you find yourself working for it is important to keep in mind that they will not be privy to the jargon of your company, as such you may find yourself causing more questions to be raised than answered by your letters, whey this was not your intent. It is also key to remember to keep the audience that you’re writing to in mind, if you make letter geared to the writer instead of the reader you may also cause unnecessary confusion. In order to persuade others to your point of view it helps to be able to show them why it will be worth their time to agree with you. Keep the readers self-esteem in mind as well, this is important to being able to persuade them to your side of the argument, if you offend them they will be more likely to reject you out of hand without hearing what you have to say. Keeping language up to date is also important, if you use outdated phrases such as “enclosed herewith” it will be regarded as an anachronism instead of have the meaning of showing the writer as learned as it would have years ago. To add to the likely hood that the letter will be read and not thrown out, the writer tries to keep a more personal tone that the reader will find inviting.
Difficulty in a number of the above mentioned tactics for writing a letter that the reader will be able to understand and not be offended by is seen in the use of “rejection letters”. It is exceptionally difficult to reject someone without hurting their pride due to simple human nature and the way that we take not being accepted. In situations such as this it helps to have a writer that has been well trained in rhetoric and can manipulate the tone of the letter to sound more favorable while still getting the underlying points across. This use of rhetoric though would bring up issues that have been addressed in previous classes about ethics. A good way to help to write letters to the average person is to keep the general ideas of how we talk on a daily basis in mind. If you use language that is similar to spoken vernaculars then it will be more likely to be well received.
There is a direct and an indirect method to telling someone bad news via an e-mail correspondence.
Direct: Thanks….Because…..Sorry…..Thanks
Indirect: Thanks….Sorry….Because……Thanks
Both ways of doing this letter begin with and end with thanks. This is to help keep the reader from having their pride or feelings damaged by the contents of the note any more than they have to be. The switching of “sorry” and “because” is where the biggest principle difference in the two styles lies. When starting with “because” it shows the reader an explanation first so that they will not have to be hit initially with the bad news, but rather they can be eased into it.
Primary functions of memos are to:
Inform people of a problem or situation
Nail down responsibility for action, and a deadline for it
Establish a file record of decision, agreements and policies
Secondary functions are:
Serving as a basis for formal reports
Helping to bring new personnel up-to-date
Replacing personal contact with people you cannot always get along with
And handling people who ignore your oral directions
There are three main things to consider when organizing a memo
What are the facts?
What do they mean?
What do we do from here?
When in a corporate environment it is important to keep in mind the fact that most high ranking executives will be turned off by overly wordy memos and letters. Length is in reality not that important, the important part of the memo comes with if it is efficient or not. It must be able to get its point across and be comprehensible. Most companies look for ways to cut down on the time that their employees have to spend reading and writing because it is money that the company is losing to pay them when they have to do it. A recent survey showed that it cost one company $10 for every one memo that they send out, and that they send out over 1,800,000 memos a year.
Be sure to keep proper punctuation in mind as well, an error here can cause a lot of heartache. While it can be useful to use a lot of exclamation marks in e-mails, make sure that you do not get carried away with this, it can subtract from your credibility and make you seem unprofessional. Contractions are okay to use in more casual situations, but should be avoided in more formal context.
Most people in the business world have to write reports of one kind or another. There is not however a clear definition of what a report is. It can be nothing more than an informative document or it can be something with a persuasive or argumentative tone.

Outline

Ethics

Ethics has always been an important topic in most any field, but has recently started to become a bigger topic in the realm of technical communication. Ethics is generally involves the process of making judgments about a set of values. Some say that the internet is the most fair and balanced system of communication that the world has seen to date, due to the fact that no one person or group can claim to have ownership over it. Others however argue that it is in face biased and unfair in that people that are already privileged can gain easier access to it and have an easier time manipulating it. The purpose of studying ethics is to give us the ability not to understand what is right and wrong, but rather to allow us to articulate to others what this difference is. It is also important to allow you to take your own personal prejudices out of the equation and make a decision without a previous bias. Historical views only become relevant to our daily lives in a very broad way; they do not allow for the change that occurs in the world and do not consider how ethical viewpoints may change. Ethics is considered to be a branch of philosophy, which was established by Plato. Plato believe that following the “soul” would lead to the correct interpretation of ethics. Socrates believed in following ethics and doing what was right regardless of the consequences, he believe that it was a way of following God, and that it also required social interactions. Perelman showed that there is no absolute basis or authority for values, and therefore for ethics. He stipulated that our language was our value. Weaver said that our values are the foundation for rhetoric. If you take both of these as true, does it lead to a certain amount of circular logic?

Harty 49-115

Jargon is a technical language unique to a particular business and becomes a problem when this language is used outside of that business. Gobbledygook must be avoided whenever possible as it is an extreme version of jargon that leads to little other than confusion. I personally think that jargon should generally be kept to a minimum as much as possible so that communication will flow as freely as possible. Unfortunately gobbledygook has found its way into most places in the world that require higher education, such as legal areas as well as academic ones. A good way to keep such language to a minimum is to not over embellish phrases; instead of saying “give consideration to” say “consider” for example.
When writing in the workplace it is important to use specific examples and references. Do not try to be overly vague. It can be very tempting to use jargon to fill space in a memo and to actually say very little, but this should be avoided whenever possible.
Non-sexist communication in the workplace and in any setting is important. Many companies are developing their own ways of doing away with such language. One example is Franklin and Marshall College who have developed 9 ways of doing this.
1) Address your reader
2) Eliminate the pronoun
3) Replace the pronouns with articles
4) Use plural nouns and pronouns
5) Alternate male and female pronouns throughout text
6) Use both pronouns and vary their order
7) Use specific genderless nouns
8) Substitute job titles or descriptions
9) Repeat the noun or use a synonym
English has become the language of choice in the business community across the world. As such many people devote large amounts of time and energy into perfecting the use of it. The problem arises though, that since they are not native speakers they have the potential to make errors that are taken as offensive or that cause massive misunderstanding. The better their grasp of the English language becomes the more dangerous and likely these mistakes become because people are not expecting them.

Elbow Style Exercise

A new student organization always has a need for people to invest time and energy into startup. There is a need for technical documents that show how the officers should conduct themselves in matters pertaining to the running of the organization. It should reflect how the meetings will be held, what the different officers will do what at the meetings, and the various other duties of the members. It should also have information that tells how the treasurer should handle the money that comes in through both membership dues and donations to mission outreach projects. One of the goals for the organization is to eventually start sending people to other countries on mission trips, in order to do this a large amount of money will have to be raised and collected. Keeping such a stockpile of money in a lockbox on one person would be an unnecessary risk. Therefore there needs to be a guideline on how to handle dealings with a bank for the treatment of these funds, and clear setup for a way to make sure that no one person can have easy access to the funds in a way that would lead to the temptation to steal from the organization’s goals and have the money used for other means.

After the initial technical manual, that will show the members and officers how the organization should be run, is complete there is also a need for a website that will explain many of these concepts to an audience at a level that is easier for the average reader to understand. The technical manual will have to use very complex language in order to be precise enough so that its purpose and goals are not misunderstood, as such it could have language in it that makes it difficult for some potential members to understand. The website’s primary goal will be the recruiting of new members and keeping existing members up to date on the dealings of the organization. It will feature sections that allows for people to sign up for a mailing list, it will also feature the technical manual in pdf format, but retain the easiest access to sections that are designed for recruitment.