Can you do a Analytical Recommendation Report and Presentation Slides for it?

Overview

This assignment requires you to effectively report analytical information while employing the principles of business writing. You will construct a recommendation report offering a problem-solving recommendation to an audience that isn’t expecting the report and may not even agree the problem exists. You will be selecting a real problem from your life, work, or school—preferably something that is important to you and/or is important in your discipline—and writing a report to a person with the power to solve that problem, persuading her to change her policy. The topic should be sufficiently complex to merit analysis, though not so complex that a sufficient analysis would exceed the requirements for this assignment.

In addition, your report writing situation must

· Not be a personal complaint. Part of the point of this assignment is to explore how writing can effect real social change, and while writing a report about a personal complaint (e.g., “My fries were cold”) has the potential to generate change for you (e.g., free fries, next visit), it’s more useful, I think, to attempt to create real change that will benefit others. We’ll be discussing some past examples and topic possibilities in class.

· Have a real chance of effecting change. There’s little point in writing a report to make a recommendation you know won’t be accepted (e.g. “I think you should stop selling fries and start selling sushi”); your writing situation needs to address a problem to which you can offer a realistic solution that will be taken seriously by the recipient.

· Generate resistance/Have a legitimate counterargument. At the same time, you don’t want to suggest a change that is essentially common sense; you need to address a policy that has a good reason for existing. In one case, for example, a student wrote to his internship supervisor, suggesting the company hire a full-time computer programmer so that engineers didn’t devote so much time to programming. The student anticipated the supervisor’s counterarguments—financial constraints and lack of necessity—and wrote a much better recommendation as a result.

Potential topics

Here are some topics students have chosen in the past, just to help you start thinking about your topic.

· Adding more volleyball posts on a local beach

· Modifying the city’s street sweeping program

· Changing scheduling policies for restaurant staff

· Altering the curriculum of a major (e.g., eliminating or adding a requirement, or adding a course)

· Arguing for a rule change at a dog park

· Proposing a change in a business plan

In other words, this can address just about any situation you’d like changed, whether in your community, your school, your program, or whatever. The point is that even situations like these are complex, assuming you actually want your change to occur.

Consider the example of adding volleyball posts to a local beach. Many people who wanted to accomplish this might call the city or write a general letter (or e-mail) that said, basically, “add more poles!” The student who took on the project, though, knew that he had to persuade the city on its own terms, by trying to first understand why they had the number of poles they did – surely the reason wasn’t just that the people putting them in got tired. Someone made a decision, for a reason.

So he did the research. He called the city to find out why they decided as they did; it had to do with the ease of maintaining the beach with their mechanical sand sweepers – more poles = more headache. So then he contacted a neighboring town, and learned that they were able to keep more poles on their beach using a different technique. Knowing this allowed him to write a much smarter proposal that anticipated the city’s argument and addressed it in a concrete fashion.

Process

Your process for these reports will be as follows:

1. Find a situation/topic and an audience. Once you’ve developed your idea, you’ll post your idea to the week 3 discussion board get your topic approved before getting any further along in the process.

2. Analyze the situation. Analyze your particular situation, concentrating on the particular problem and solution you’re suggesting; remember that a crucial element of the assignment is convincing your audience that the problem exists, that it’s important that they try to solve it, and that your solution is the best.

3. Conduct research. Figure out why the current situation exists and gain an understanding of the complexity of the situation. Remember how important it is that you understand the reasons that policies exist before you can expect that they will be changed.

4. Draft your report. Taking into account your rhetorical analysis, write a draft of your report.

5. Review. You will have a chance to get peer review feedback on your draft.

6. Revise. Using the feedback you received from different sources, you will revise your report.

7. Send your report. If you put some careful work into your report, maybe it has a good chance at making a real difference in something that you care about!

Report Components

Your finished report must include

· a letter or memo of transmittal

· a title page

· table of contents

· an executive summary

· the text of the report (8-10 pages), including various needed sections (i.e. Methodology, Results, Discussion)

· a minimum of five sources

· at least two exhibits

· appendices (if applicable)

· a reference page

All of these elements are explained in Chapter 10 of the text.

Some Evaluation Criteria

A successful report will

· effectively construct the problem for the reader, so that the importance of the problem to the reader is thoroughly established

· argue effectively for the recommendation that is being offered, persuading the reader that your solution is the best

· include visual elements to elaborate key points

· have a logical pattern of organization; transitions from one idea to the next that guide the reader through the material; unified paragraphs

· have language and tone adapted to the subject, purpose, and audience

· have few correctness problems (grammar, spelling, etc.)

· have an inviting appearance and be easy to read