For the assigned standard business letter, students are to compose a semi-formal letter in block format. In the letter, students should articulate to a potential investor their qualifications for offering the proposal they will be preparing later in the course (one based upon the process analysis and evaluation previously discussed), followed by a request for an appointment to make a presentation to secure investment capital. As the letter will work in tandem with the standard resume students will prepare for class, it should avoid focusing its discussion on the information contained in the resume.
The investor in question is the chief executive officer of Awesome Investing, Ben Egan. The company's main office is at 6920 North Loop 1604 West in San Antonio, Texas. The address is fictional, but students will need to find the postal code the address would have if real.
The required features of the letter are listed on page 94 of the standard course textbook, with the following changes to be applied:
Heading is to be from the address of the main campus of TCI, which is available on the school's website
Subject line is not expected
Reference initials should not appear, as students should not be dictating the letter
Copy notation should indicate that a copy of the letter is retained in the writer's files
The assignment, of which an example appears as a PDF document below, will be graded based on 1) the effectiveness of the piece, 2) adherence to the formatting standards established for the letter, 3) completeness and accuracy of information throughout, and 4) adherence to the conventions of edited academic American English as discussed in the current edition of the MLA style guides throughout. (Please see the Purdue University Online Writing Lab for more information regarding those standards, here; be sure to follow MLA rules.) Each category will be assigned a grade, A+ through 0, and the average of those category grades will be recorded as the total assignment grade.
The assignment must be submitted as a typed hard copy at the beginning of class on the day the course calendar indicates the assignment is due. Email copies may be submitted only with PRIOR approval of the instructor, offered on a case-by-case basis by direct consultation. Handwritten copies are not acceptable in any case. Failure to follow stated submission guidelines will result in the submitted assignment being discarded.
Students are reminded that appropriate citation must be provided for any externally referenced information, and all included information must be justified. That is, any time external information is included, there must be a reason, expressed along with that information, for its inclusion. Such materials must also be appropriately integrated into the student's writing. Acceptable standards for doing so appear on the Purdue University Online Writing Lab, here; be sure to follow MLA rules. FAILURE TO ACCOUNT FOR SOURCES IS PLAGIARISM AND WILL BE DEALT WITH HARSHLY.