Task

The attached is a poorly written memo that reads like it was written in a stream-of- consciousness style. It is difficult for its audience to read, and murky in its purpose (Is it meant to persuade the reader to write the manual? To set up a future discussion?). And it fails to address the context: The author asks for a lot of favors, and knows that the reader is very busy and would need to work this into an already overloaded schedule. Given that context, the author has done a poor job with rhetorical strategy.

Rewrite this memo as an efficient, concise email with the clear central purpose of persuading the reader to write the manual and setting up a meeting to discuss it. After your revision, include an analysis of audience, purpose, context, and logical and rhetorical strategy in which you explain the choices you made in reworking the document. Use specific supporting details in explaining your choices.

To: Training Director From: Jon Smith Date: September 24, 20 Re: New Training Manual

We need your help in getting the company trained on the new RAD software system. We developed this new, proprietary software in-house and want to roll it out to the entire company by the end of the year. We need you to develop a manual we can use for this new implementation and overall this is what I see as a user guide that would be used to help folks get-up-to-speed on the new RAD software.

I'm thinking, that the manual should have a few sections. None of these sections need to be very long either. There should be a section on how to use templates and another on how to create a new document from scratch. We should also have something on how to create a spreadsheet. The section on spreadsheets should explain how this feature will be critical when they need to use formulas and it will also be helpful for maintaining large amounts of data.

Sometimes people need to create documents from scratch. The new RAD software has a lot of text formatting features that can be used to create a new document, including the ability to create text that is bold, italicized, and in color. But if people want help making there documents look good, they can also use the templates that are included with the software. Another section the guide should cover is merging documents. This software will allow people to easily put two documents together that are in totally different formats. It automatically interprets formatting and reapplies new, consistent styles without much effort. We need to explain that this is a state-of-the art feature and we see it having a great impact on how quickly and efficiently we complete our work.

This document might be sort of similar to the guide we wrote last year on the new payroll system which was very successful user guide, and we'd like to have that same type of successful result.