Informal Letter Report #2
For the second Informal Letter Report, I would like each of you to explore the presence of technical writing in a company within your field; you are welcome to select a company for whom you currently work or with whom you would like to work when you graduate. This is an opportunity for you to investigate multiple companies within your field to see what kinds of projects they have done and/or are actively completing and whether they focus on the type of work that you would like to do once you obtain your degree. Conversely, if you currently work in the field, you have a head start because you will be familiar with the projects and/or you will have immediate access to the employees within the company who are involved with that work.
Having identified your company, you will conduct research on the company through the company’s website, articles about the company, interviews that you might conduct with individuals at the company, and other relevant sources. At this point, you will actively research the kinds of projects that are associated with that company and determine what kinds of technical writing are necessary for that work. The technical writing may not be directly discussed in the explanation of projects, but having conducted your research last week about the kinds of report writing done within your industry, you should be able to apply what you have learned to the type of project for the company. In other words, you now have a good idea of the types of technical reports that are written based on the research that you conducted for the Informal Letter Report #1, and you can apply that information to the more specific projects for that company.
Just as the first informal letter report, this report will follow a letter format. You will, therefore, create a personal letterhead with your name and contact information (you do not have to use your actual contact information if you would like to keep that private); the date; a recipient address (your recipient can be anyone in class and/or me and the address can simply be the address for our classroom building), the greeting, the body of the letter, the closing and signature line.
The components of this report will include the following:
Introduction
In the introduction you will set the stage for the report. You will explain what the report will cover as well as what it is intended to do. In order to provide the overview for the report, you might ask yourself questions, such as “What information do I hope to share with my audience and why.” It will be important to include a Statement of Purpose in this introduction that presents the primary objective in a straightforward and direct declarative sentence.
Research Methods
The Research Methods section will explain your strategy for conducting research for this project. You might include such information as the types of sources offered by the company itself; you can access the company’s website and other social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. that present specific information about what the company is doing and has done. You might include a brief evaluation of these sources as to their effectiveness given the type of material that you are attempting to find. Additionally, you might explain whether you conducted primary research with employees at the company and what your strategy in either doing so or not doing so was in terms of gathering information. Finally, you might describe how you approached secondary or outside resources for this report, speaking to your consideration of industry resources.
Findings
The Findings section will discuss the information that you gathered, exploring a range of ideas and areas of discussion. In other words, the findings contain the “meat” of the report. In this section you will be able to share what you have learned about the subject matter with your audience. For this report, then, you will use this section to present the information that you obtained related to the technical report writing associated with the projects or services performed by the company. You can decide whether you would like to track a single project and explain the technical writing performed throughout that project or whether you would like to explore multiple projects that require varied forms of technical report writing. The development of these ideas will likely occur in multiple paragraphs, dictated by the number of ideas that you intend to cover.
Conclusions
In this final section, you will pull out what you believe are the most significant “takeaways” from the research that you have done, and you will emphasize that information by explaining its importance to the discussion. For example, you might highlight what you feel are the most important aspects of technical writing at the company. This is the space where you indicate to your readers how and why this research has value for you and for them.
Having completed the primary aspects of the letter, you will include a brief paragraph that provides a forward looking statement, offers to provide help and/or further information, and presents contact information.
The final component will include the closing and your signature line.