Effective Writing in the Workplace

Instruction

Imagine you have graduated from Harvard University and have a job in your chosen field. Given your superior writing ability, your supervisor has asked you to give a presentation to a room new employees entitled, “Effective Writing in the Workplace.”

This Assignment’s Rhetorical Context:

Audience: A room full of new hires

Content: Effective professional writing

Goals: 1) Teach the audience what you’ve learned about professional writing, in your own language. 2) Seize and hold your audience’s attention. 3) Produce a final oral presentation that adheres to the assignment rubric.

Two Parts to This Assignment

1) The Handout

As a team, you’ll write a Handout that offers your audience distilled advice about how to write effectively in the workplace. Your Handout should be designed to be speed-read; it should capture and hold your audience’s attention.  (Feel free to use a pamphlet or brochure format). Your Handout should contain the essential lessons you learned in this class, as well as any other advice you might have learned yourself that you believe is crucial for writing effectively in the workplace.

Your Handout must contain at least the following content (though you can decide how best, and in what order, you deliver the information): 1) an explanation of building effective paragraphs,  2) an explanation of the writing process, 3) an explanation of rhetorical analysis and its importance, 4) an explanation of the principles of professional writing, 5) an explanation of the benefits of writing effectively, 6) an explanation of how to compel an audience, 7) and anything else you’ve learned or discovered on your own this term that feels essential.

Imagine the Handout to be a document you might distribute to the audience after your presentation.

2) The Presentation:

The Presentation is an individual assignment, completed on your own. Guidelines for this portion of the assignment can be found under the link by that title in Module 4.