3 Letter and 1 reflection

 

Roughly two pages collectively(three letters + a reflection)—spaced as would be necessary in the professional world

As a student at SF State, it’s likely that you, or one of your classmates, have purchased textbooks, plush alligators or other school supplies from the campus bookstore. For many, this is an unpleasant experience: long lines, uninformed staff members, cranky peers, expensive books, frustrating return and restocking policies, and so on.

For this assignment, you will write three responses for three different audiences and possibly three different mediums to your hypothetically unpleasant experience at the SF State bookstore, and a reflection rationalizing the context of your responses.  

If this particular scenario is not relatable, please feel free to use a circumstance that is more familiar.

For each individual response, you must consider medium, context, audience, motive and rhetoric (i.e. how is writing to the president of the university going to differ from writing an anonymous review on the internet?).  This assignment contains four parts:


1. Write to SF State’s president, Dr. Leslie Wong, expressing your dissatisfaction with the way things are run at the bookstore. 

2. Write an anonymous internet-based review (think Yelp, Reddit, etc.) airing out your frustrations with SF State’s bookstore. Perhaps consider what differences exist within the context of writing to the president versus an online medium. 



3. Write to your friend who manages the bookstore, filling them in on the various complaints you’ve heard, as well as the things you’ve noticed that might drive away customers. 

4. Finally, once you’ve written your three responses, write a reflection explaining your rationale behind each one: 

·  · What was your motivation? 

·  · How did the audience influence your rhetoric/approach?

·  · Why did you adopt the tone that you did?

·  · Why did you choose the medium that you did? 

·  · What were you hoping to attain/prove by saying what you did? 

·  · What was at stake (if anything) when expressing your complaints? 

·  · What kinds of things did you have to take into account when writing each response?  



Please refer to our in class discussions on notions of rhetoric, audience, goals and genre, to get an idea of the language and style that will be most appropriate for each response. Have fun!