Your third assignment is to produce—individually or collaboratively—a sales letter and a fact sheet, which will be handed in together. First, read the online assignments for those documents and the pages assigned from the text.
After you have decided on topics for your sales letter and fact sheet (which may treat the same topic in different ways), inform the instructor of your ideas in a memo posted to WebCT. The instructor will give you permission to go ahead with the topic and make suggestions. Topics must be real, and students need to have some knowledge of and experience with them. Do not make things up, and don’t write about what you don’t know. The purpose of this memo is to get the instructor’s permission to go ahead with your plans for the sales letter and fact sheet, so show him that you’ve thought carefully about the documents.
Divide the memo into two main sections on the sales letter and fact sheet. Then break each main section into five subsections: see instructions below.
For the sales letter, tell me
1. the topic about which you want to persuade an audience (product, service, event, organization, and so on).
2. the audience to whom you’re directing the letter: describe the audience as specifically as possible in terms of age, gender, socioeconomic means, ethnicity, and so on.
3. the action you want the audience to perform.
4. the primary values,
interests, and concerns of the audience with respect to the topic: these
are the characteristics of the audience that you will appeal to and about which
you will show the topic’s application.
For example, you might try to sell an audience on a solar water heater
by appealing to its concern for
(a) economy: saving money
(b) the environment
(c) reliability.
Values, interests, and concerns are usually general and abstract words.
5. the application of
the topic to the audience’s values, interests, and concerns you just
listed. If you’re selling the solar
water heater, for example, and the audience is interested in economy, the environment,
and reliability, then you’ll want in your letter to describe
(a) how much a solar water heater can reduce electric bills—how long it will
take to “pay for itself”
(b) how much sense it makes to use solar power in the South (because of
abundant sunshine) rather than coal, and
(c) how long solar water heaters last—much longer than gas or electric heaters.
Record for this memo short descriptions of the primary
aspects of the topic you’ll present for the audience.
For the fact sheet, tell me
1. the topic about which you want to inform and/or persuade an audience (product, service, event, organization, and so on).
2. the audience for the fact sheet: be as specific as possible in terms of age, gender, socioeconomic means, ethnicity, and so on.
3. the persuasive purpose—if any—that you have with regard to the audience: fact sheets are usually less focused on persuading an audience to do something specific. However, all fact sheets at least encourage the audience to inquire further about the topic.
4. the primary values,
interests, and concerns of the audience with respect to the topic: these
are the aspects of the topic that your audience is most interested in. Even if the topic for the fact sheet is the
same as the topic for the sales letter, the fact sheet has room to cover more
and different material than the letter.
For example, a fact sheet on solar water heating would have room to address
these audience concerns (compare with above):
(a) economy: saving money
(b) the environment
(c) reliability
(d) the mechanics of solar water heating—how it works
(e) installation of solar water
(f) maintenance and trouble-shooting
(g) safety in storms, especially hurricanes
5. the
primary facts you’ll present about
the topic, for example, about solar water heating:
(a) savings vs. electric heaters, and how many years it will take for solar to
“pay for itself”
(b) the attractiveness of using solar in the South
(c) how long solar water heaters last
(d) different kinds of systems, the usual system for Southern environments, and
the electrical back-up for solar heating
(e) explanation of certified installation
(f) common seasonal maintenance for solar water heaters
(g) special installation procedures and safeguards for environments subject to
hurricanes
A good memo, again, will have two major sections with five parts each. Class members who do a good job on this memo will do better than others on the sales letter and fact sheet.