The e-mails below are not written as clearly or concisely as they could be. In addition, they may
have problems in organization or tone or mechanical errors. Rewrite them so they are
appropriate for the audience and their purpose. Correct grammatical and mechanical errors.
Finally, add a subject line to each.
Liberty University
AVIA 245 Aviation Leadership
Professor: Jim Molloy
2022
E-Mail 1
To: Employees of The Enormously Successful Corporation
From: CEO of The Enormously Successful Corporation
Subject:
Stop bringing bottled soft drinks, juices and plastic straws to work. Its an environment problem that
increases our waste and the quality of our water is great. People don’t realize how much wasted energy
goes into shipping all that stuff around, and plastic bottles, aluminum cans and straws are ruining our
oceans and filling land fills. Have you seen the floating island of waste in the Pacific Ocean? Some of this
stuff comes from other countries like Canada Dry I think is from canada and we are taking there water
and Canadians will be thirsty. Fancy drinks isn’t as good as the water we have and tastes better anyway.
E-Mail 2
To: All Employees
From: Management
Subject:
Our Committee to Improve Inter-Office Communication has decided that there needs to be an update
and revision of our policy on emailing messages to and from those who work with us as employees of
this company. The following are the results of the committee’s decisions, and constitute
recommendations for the improvement of every aspect of email communication.
1. Too much wordiness means people have to read the same thing over and over repeatedly, time
after time. Eliminating unnecessary words, emails can be made to be shorter and more to the
point, making them concise and taking less time to read.
2. You are only allowed to send and receive messages between 8:30AM east coat time and 4:30PM
east coast time. You are also not allowed to read e-mails outside of these times. We know that
for those of you on the west coast or travelling internationally it will reduce the time that you
are allowed to attend to e-mail, but we need this to get it under control.
3. You are only allowed to have up to 3 recipients on each e-mail. If more people need to be
informed it is up to the people to inform them.
2. Write a self-evaluation that focuses specifically on your class participation in this course. Making
comments during class allows you to improve your ability to speak extemporaneously, which is
exactly what you will have to do in all kinds of business situations (e.g., meetings, asking
questions at presentations, one-on-one conversations). Thus, write a short memo (two or three
paragraphs) in which you describe the frequency with which you make comments in class, the
nature of those comments, and what is easy and difficult for you when it comes to speaking up
in class.
If you have made few (or no) comments during class, this is a time for us to come up with a plan to help
you overcome your shyness. Our experience is that as soon as a person talks in front of a group once or
twice, it becomes much easier—so we need to come up with a way to help you break the ice.
Finally, please comment on what you see as the strengths and weaknesses of your discussions and
presentations in this class.
3. Comment on the body language exhibited by each person at the meeting and how engaged they
are in the communication.
4. In the movie The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is stranded on Mars
with limited ability to communicate with mission control. Watney holds up questions to a
camera that can transmit photographs of his questions, and mission control could respond by
pointing the camera at a “yes” or “no” card with the camera. Eventually, they are able to
exchange “text” messages but no voice exchanges. Also, there is a significant time delay
between the sending and receipt of the messages. Which part of the communication process
would have to be addressed to ensure that the encoding of the messages, the decoding of the
messages, and that noise is minimized by Watney and mission control?
Ginni Rometty is the CEO of IBM. Shortly after taking on the role of CEO and being frustrated by the
progress and sales performance, Rometty released a five-minute video to all 400,000 plus IBM
employees criticizing the lack of securing deals to competitors and lashed out at the sales organization
for poor sales in the preceding quarter. Six months later, Rometty sent another critical message, this
time via e-mail. How effective will the video and e-mail be in communicating with employees? How
should she follow up to these messages?
Social media, such as Facebook, is now widespread. Place yourself as a manager that has just received
a “friend” request from one of your direct reports. Do you accept, reject, or ignore the request? Why,
and what additional communication would you have regarding this with the employee?
During a cross-functional meeting, one of the attendees who reports to a manager who is also at the
meeting accuses one of your reports of not being fit for the position she is in. You disagree and feel that
your report is a good fit for her role. How do you handle this?
