Document Development Exposition: Workplace Correspondence

Explain in detail your document’s development from planning to finish, describing your
challenges, how you overcame them, and what you learned.

Planning
From the beginning, the email and memo were planned to revolve around a similar topic to the
white paper. I had planned to ask the North Carolina Wildlife Committee about wildlife overpasses
and underpasses to help reduce wildlife-vehicle accidents. I acted as a committee member talking to
one of the decisive board members to complete the operation. By asking the board, I could make the
situation seem real in the sense that the board members would be discussing my proposal and
making a decision. The email was sent first, and the memo was sent in a way that made it seem like
the board member wanted to know more about my proposal.

First Draft (for peer editing)

My email started off being written to the North Carolina Wildlife Federation as a whole. I wrote
about discussing a possible solution to the issue of wildlife-vehicle collisions among North Carolinian
highways. I presented research on costs of collisions as well as the costs of the solution (being
overpasses for animals) and how the prevention of accidents using this method would eventually
reimburse the costs of the solution itself. By preventing highway accidents, the solution would save
more money than the original accidents cost to mitigate.

For the memo, I started by presenting more specific research on affordability. I got specific numbers
from my research to calculate affordability and added alternative options depending on the budget
of the board/committee. An Urgency and Closing tab was added to summarize the memo slightly.

Second Draft (for your packet)

The second and final drafts of the email were the same (as I had no peer feedback). I changed the
subject of the email to someone within the workplace (as the email had to be from an inside source)
like I was writing to a board member within my company. The subject was changed to the
conservationist board member for the federation, Steve Jester. As a concluding message, I added a
direction to contact me if he or the board had any questions and thanked him for his time and
consideration to my proposal. Concluding text (name, title, contact info) was formatted to be
different than the body text.

For the memo, headings were made less colorful to keep the minimalistic style, and the introductory
paragraph was edited to address a more concentrated audience. The summary was also changed in a
similar way, it highlighted the entire memo while also bringing forth the idea of audience action
again.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

 Document Development Exposition: Workplace Correspondence

The final draft was changed once again to add recommendations, which added steps for the
audience (being the federation board). Steps were changed to a bulleted list to make them easier to
read at the end of the memo.