Letter of Professional Introduction

Your first assignment is to write your instructor a letter (individually). This letter, concentrating on professional information about your educational and employment experiences, will help prepare you to write successful employment documents (resume and application letter) later in the term. Review carefully the pages in the textbook on letter writing and check the instructor’s outline of basic letter format. The letter of professional introduction should be at least two pages long.

Here is an overview of the letter in terms of SCAMP:

• Style: Not all business or technical writing is formal, although it should always be correct (correctness and formality are two entirely different dimensions). You may choose to be somewhat less than formal in this letter, employing, for example, contractions and fewer polysyllabic words (told instead of informed, work instead of employment, and so on). You will need to use many first-person pronouns (I), but try not to start too many sentences in a row with I (that can also be a problem in application letters).
  
  

Stilted, archaic, and needlessly complex language is sometimes a problem in these letters, as students try too hard to sound important and what they take to be business-like. But don’t write anything like this: “Pursuant to your request of 10 June for the creation post-haste of an epistle that will prove both enlightening and instructive, please find herewith ….”

On the other hand, do take the time to combine ideas into longer, more mature sentences that help the reader sort through information. Here, for example, is a jumble of bits of information in short, simple sentences: “My next job was at a pharmacy. I was a cashier and delivery driver. I also got to create displays for seasonal products.” That information can be presented more economically with use of a relative clause beginning with where: “My next job was at a pharmacy, where I cashiered, made deliveries, and created displays for seasonal products.” Such a sentence needs to be punctuated correctly, of course: a relative clause that adds extra information requires a comma before it.

• Chunking: Business and technical writing is distinguished by, among other things, careful segmentation or division of information--"chunking." Good chunking increases the readability, visual appeal, and memorability of prose. The paragraph (single-spaced, unindented in business letters) is the basic tool of chunking. If a writer has two suggestions to make, for example, they might be chunked in separate paragraphs in order to represent the fact that they are two different ideas.

Besides the paragraph, business and technical writing uses some other tools for chunking, which the document you are reading right now demonstrates:

• headings/heads
• horizontal white space
• vertical white space

Heads announce subject matter, preparing a reader for what is to come and enabling easy scanning and reviewing. White space across the page, because business and technical writing is usually single-spaced, makes documents easier on the eyes. Vertical white space surrounds lists like the one above and highlights items that would otherwise be lost in paragraph form.

Use heads, horizontal white space, and vertical white space in your letters. Heads should correspond with the various professional subjects you choose to tell me about. Horizontal white space should separate all paragraphs, and extra white space (perhaps two empty lines) may be used to separate major sections. Lists can be employed to display, for example, jobs you have held, schools you have attended, or majors you have declared(!).

Some care needs to be taken with the style of heads and lists. They need to be (1) consistent and (2) parallel. If, for example, you choose to use bold and all caps for your major heads, then all your major heads need to be bold and all caps. That is consistency. If you employ sub-heads, they need to be done differently than are the major heads and consistently--italics and initial caps, for example.

Parallelism is the similarity of grammatical structure among heads or items in a list. If, for example, your first major head is a noun phrase like Educational Background (an adjective plus noun), your next major head should be a noun phrase as well, such as Work Experience. If it were Working in High School, the head would not be parallel (it is a present participle plus prepositional phrase). Parallelism need not be absolutely exact. A head such as Work Experience in High School would be perfectly acceptable after Educational Background.

Within sentences, parallelism is a matter of style. If you list duties at a job, for example, the list needs to be in parallel grammatical form, such as the –ing phrases in the following: “My duties at the pharmacy included cashiering, creating displays for seasonal products, stocking and restocking, and making deliveries.”

Information on basic letter format can be found in the textbook. In brief, use one-inch margins, single spacing (except between paragraphs), and the following sections (in full block format, I suggest): writer's address, date line, inside address, salutation, body, complimentary close, signature, and typed name. Refer to the text for specifics and models.

Note the textbook’s directions on headers, which should appear after the first page: they should contain the recipient’s name, page number, and date. The instructor assumes that you know how to create headers and to keep them off the first page. If you don’t know, first check Word Help.

The textbook does not mention a common line in business letters (which does appear in the instructor’s overview of basic letter format): the subject line. After the salutation, a writer writer has the option of advertising very clearly the subject matter that the letter addresses. If you want to use such a line (which is taken from memo format), skip a line before and after it:

Dear Dr. Campbell:

Subject: Letter of introduction

I am writing this letter to prepare myself for employment documents to be completed later in the term in ENGL 3010….

• Audience: Your audience is your instructor, who wants you to start thinking about your professional past and future and who thinks that the more he knows about your professional self, the better advice he can give on your employment documents. So keep primarily to professional details, but a course is also a collection of people, so some personal background and explanation are also quite acceptable.

The first section of a business or technical document is introductory and should be explicitly geared to the needs of the audience. The introductory section, which is commonly not headed, should do four things:

• state the writer's purpose: in this case, state that you are writing the letter to prepare yourself for employment documents to be written later in the term.
• refer to the context of the document, for example, an assignment, task, conversation, memo, ongoing project, etc.: in this case, refer to the fact that your letter is the first assignment in ENGL 3010. Context and/or purpose can often be referred to in a subject line if one is used.
• establish good will: the old rhetoricians said the introduction should make an audience attentive (interested), benevolent (well-disposed to the writer), and docile (willing to receive instruction), so say something nice that comes naturally and is relevant to the occasion, in our case the first assignment of an academic term.
• overview what is to come in the document: use the language of your major heads to say what the letter contains, e.g., “In this letter you will find a description of my educational and employment history, a review of my current work and activities, and my thoughts about the future” (notice the parallel structure in that sentence).

Memorize these four requisites of an introduction. They should be present in all your introductions this term.

• Message: Use the following directives as suggestions of what content you might want to include in your letter. You will not be able to include responses to all the directives, and you might want to include content not suggested by these directives.

• Tell me about your background:
• review your education, especially college; record what important skills you have gained, what major goals accomplished, what projects relevant to your major you have completed during college courses—research projects, case studies, team efforts, and so on;
• review your employment history, including unpaid work, and comment on what work has been most satisfying to you and why, what skills you've gained on past jobs and what accomplishments attained;
• review past activities you have been involved in and explain why these were important to you and how they might aid you in the future;
• comment on other experiences, such as travel, hobbies, skills, honors--whatever from your past that makes you special;
• tell me what is important to you in life; list your values, such as wealth, power, freedom, competition, etc.;
• describe what environments have seemed to satisfy you--outdoors, fast-paced, quiet, etc.;
• tell me what you are most proud of so far in your life.
• Tell me about your current work and activities:
• describe your current paid or unpaid work: what you do, where you do it, for whom you do it, with whom you do it, why you do it, how you do it, and when you do it: what the job requires and how you meet the requirements;
• describe your current activities, what they might demand of you and what you have accomplished in them;
• describe how you contribute most to the organizations with which you are involved.
• Tell me about your professional goals:
• being realistic, describe what organization or kind of organization you would like to work for and why--a place you could apply to now or very soon (later in the term we'll write an application letter, which must make an application for a job that you could really do now or very soon, within months);
• or tell me about a position that you would like to fill and why you would be a good candidate for it;
• or tell me about an internship, part-time job, or temporary/summer job that you are interested in and that you could apply for;
• or tell me about the next educational step you might take, one that will require an application to, for example, graduate school or law school;
• in general, tell me about what professional goals you will soon want to obtain, why you want to obtain them, and why you think you will be able to obtain them (because of certain abilities, experiences, achievements, skills, etc.).

• Purpose: Your purpose, again, is to inform your instructor of your professional past, present, and future in preparation for your writing of employment documents later in the term. Make sure this purpose is stated explicitly in the introduction.