1.Revise the following wordy and poorly organized paragraph. Add a topic sentence. Correct problems with pronouns, parallelism, and misplaced or dangling modifiers. Add transitional expressions if appropriate.
You may be interested in applying for a new position within the company. The Human Resources Department maintains these lists, and you may see which jobs are available immediately. The positions are at a high level. Current employees may apply immediately for open positions in production, for some in marketing, and jobs in administrative support are also available. To make application, these positions require immediate action. Come to the Human Resources Department. On the company intranet you can see the lists showing the open positions, what the qualifications are, and job descriptions are shown. Many of the jobs are now open. That’s why we are sending this now. To be hired, an interview must be scheduled within the next two weeks.
2.Rewrite: Weak Request Response Requires Your Revision
Blog writer Brian Drummondneedsexamples and information for a blog he plans to publish on the Online Voices platform. He writes to Nadya DeAlba, office manager at a high-tech firm, requesting information and examples. He met Ms. DeAlba at a conference and believes that she could be a willing source of information for his blog. Ms. DeAlba’s advice is valuable, but her message is poorly organized, contains writing and grammar errors, and is hard to read.
Your Task.Revise the following poorly written message from Nadya DeAlba. Identify its weaknesses including sentence fragments, wordiness, grammar faults, misspellings, and other writing problems you have studied (these do not have to be included in your post). Refer to Chapter 5 for strategies for writing professional e-mail messages. NOTE: You may want to copy the text and paste into a Word or Google Doc to edit, then copy and paste your edited email into your reply in the discussion.
To:Brian Drummond
From:Nadya DeAlba
Subject:Your Request
Brian,
Thanks for this opportunity to make a contribution to your blog post for Online Voices. You ask that I confine my remarks to five main and important points. Which I will try to do. However, I could share many more annoying habits that create tension in the workplace. They interrupt workflow, reduce productivity, and lead to stress. Here’s my top five annoying tech habits that drive coworkers crazy. I have observed these in our open office.
The first has to do with cc abuse. Todays e-mail programs make it to easy to copy people who may be unrelated to the discussion. Before clicking the cc field, writers should ask themselves whether it’s critical to ask all receivers specific questions such as who wants the vegan or the barbecue lunch. Another annoying habit is what I call “radio silence.” This occurs when receivers fail to respond to e-mails within 24 hours. It’s not that I expect responses to every Slack message, tweet, DM, text message, voice mail, or Facebook post. As a writer, however, it is annoying when important e-mail messages are ignored.
One of my coworkers complains about notification overload. Offices today are awash with chirps, dings, and rings of countless devices that are allowed to ring and echo through the sweeping open space. The constant ding, ding, dinging is not only annoying to the intended recipients. But also to nearby colleagues.
Another annoying habit has to do with jumbled threads. When writers do not observe the conventions of threading their comments on Slack or e-mail. The structure of the conversation becomes garbled. This really annoying behavior is one of the many tech irritants that aggravate coworkers.
A final irritant is channel hopping. I’ve heard a lot of complaining about coworkers who pursue the recipient from channel to channel, following an e-mail with repeated Slack messages or a text. It would be advantageous if people let there coworkers know their preferred method of staying in touch.
Hope this is helpful!
Best,
Nadya DeAlba
[Full contact information]
3.
Rewrite: Manager’s Wordy Malware Warning
Your Task: Study the following ineffective message from a manager to employees and staff. It suffers from numerous wordy constructions covered in this chapter. This exercise has two parts:
Study the message and list at least five weaknesses.
Then revise the memo to avoid excessive wordiness and repetition.
To: Employees and Staff
From: Zach Brogdon
Subject: Computer Attacks
I am sending this message because hackers using malware spread by e-mail are targeting many organizations, I think it’s a good time to give consideration to five incredibly important tips that are really helpful in preventing infection on your machine. Following are the tips:
Tip 1: Before opening an incoming e-mail, check the address of the person who sent the message. This is usually in the header. If it looks suspicious, don’t open.
Tip 2. Look carefully at the subject line. Does it claim your account will be suspended or your account suffered an unauthorized login attempt? Attempts at urgency often are clues to malicious e-mail.
Tip 3. Do you see that the sender doesn’t seem to know your name and that you are addressed anonymously as “Valued Customer”? Senders who are legitimate in all probability know your name.
Tip 4. In the matter of attachments, click only on those from senders that you know. There is danger in attachments because that’s where viruses may hide or lurk.
Tip 5. Don’t believe everything you see in an e-mail. Scammers are spectacularly clever at spoofing brands that we all know.
As a final note, if an incoming e-mail looks fishy, please use Shift Delete, which will permanently delete the e-mail. Don’t just delete, which does not remove it permanently. I hope these tips are useful!!
Zach B.
[Full contact information]