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
This assignment did not require an Assignment Prep, unlike the other assignments, therefore the
main part of the planning phase was coming up with the topic. The topic I selected was closely
related to the one I choose for the formal report, which is the issue of “dirty gold”. For the workplace
correspondence assignment, I decided to focus on reducing the use of dirty gold from a company’s
perspective, in this case the company I selected was Microsoft.

First Draft (for peer editing)

The first draft of my email was fairly straightforward, I mostly followed the format described in the
“Graves and Graves” book. The most difficult aspect of this was writing the email from the
perspective of an internal employee. The first draft of the memo was similar, I simply laid out the
issue of dirty gold and informed the recipient of changes that will be made to reduce the use of dirty
gold in Microsoft products.

Second Draft (for your packet)

I only received one response for the peer review, and the main suggestion was adding more color to
the memo. Originally the memo was completely in black and white, so I changed the headers to a
different color to make them more distinctive. For the e-mail, the main change I made was adding a
small buffer sentence to the beginning.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

The suggestions made for the final draft were mainly adding a lot of small aspects I missed. For the e-
mail I expanded the buffer statement, added contact information to the signature block, and added a
few sentences about how and when the recipient should contact me. For the memo, I reworded the
introduction to move the line stating the purpose of the document to the end of the introduction. I
also added a summary section separate from the introduction paragraph. Finally, the most major
change I made was changing the “changes” section into “recommendations” and restructuring the
paragraph into a more digestible bullet list.