In your letter, both discuss and demonstrate your progress towards your personal goals as a business or professional writer. You’ll see a sample of this kind of letter in your assignment criteria near the top of this module.

As evidence of what you say about your progress, please cut and paste short examples from your writing into your final letter or refer specifically to a whole document attached as an appendix. 

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Assignment guidelines to use as a checklist for success

The bottom line: Demonstrate in your final learning letter that you have understood how to write in Plain Language, use a reader-friendly layout–including a blueprint and matching headings–and can regularly support general statements with concrete examples, stories, and comparisons.

Here’s a sample letter from a previous class. Your final learning letter serves as your final exam (10% of your final grade).

Topic: Your topic for your final learning letter is your list of personal goals as a writer in the workplace.

You expressed your first version of those goals in your Week 1 Reflection. During the following five weeks, you wrote several SWOC analyses of the week’s study and practice of course material. While writing those SWOC analyses, you may have changed your opening list of goals in important ways. Re-read your opening goals and your weekly SWOC analyses; revise your list of personal goals as needed, whether for content, parallelism, or conciseness.

Format: Your final exam in this course is a letter (not a memo). Use a standard letter format such as the one in the sample linked above. If you wish, you can use the letter format your employer requires you to use when communicating with customers or clients.

Structure: Organize your final learning letter with a blueprint containing a parallel list of your opening or revised goals. Use the exact wording in your blueprint for the main headings in your letter.

Layout: Use the inviting layout we’ve been practicing in this course. Among its features are

• bold headings
• parallel lists
• block paragraphing that reveals slight shifts in topic or time passing

For a quick review of the basic layout that you are expected to be able to use at the end of this course, please see http://www.edbailey.org/pageslayout/pages/homelayout.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  The grading rubric for this writing summarizes these recommendations. Take care to view all of the pages in this link, all the way to the Quiz at the end.

Make the structure of your final learning letter clear and easy to read:

• Be sure to introduce your main point about your personal goals in your first paragraph.
• Use several short, well-constructed paragraphs to develop each section of your report.

Style: Your writing style in your final letter should be Plain Language, as described by The Center for Plain Language.

• Print your readability statistics after your signature as evidence of your success with this style.
• Aim for an average sentence length of around 17 words and control your use of passive voice verbs to well below 10%.

Evidence:  In each of your body paragraphs, support the point you are making by using appropriate

• brief examples,
• narrative examples, or
• comparisons.

Take your evidence from your own writing–in this course and others–this semester:

• Quote briefly from your own work within the body of your letter, or
• add a whole document as an appendix at the end of your letter. Label these appendices “A,” “B,” “C,” etc.

If you add appendices as evidence of your progress towards personal goals, mention in your letter the specific appendix you want your reader to look at. Most important, describe the specific features of the appendix that support the point you’re making about your progress.

Finally, as we have spent four of our seven weeks looking for effective uses of illustrations to add visual clarity to business documents, consider supporting at least one of the points you make in your letter with an appropriate, explanatory illustration.