Pitcha Sudjaritjuntorn

Professor Clark

English 21007-B

21 September 2018

 

Self-Reflection on Memo Assignment

            My assignment was to write a memo to inform Dr. Vincent Boudreau, the President at the City College of New York about an ongoing issue at the campus. The characteristic features of the memo included a heading (to, from, date, and the subject), the introduction/background, and the solution. Certain items in the memo can also be bulleted for easy reading. Lastly, the memo ended with a statement asking for a follow-up meeting and it required putting the sender’s contact information at the end. The message that a memo is trying to convey is to inform or persuade within an organization. The exigency of this essay was that I had to create a memo that addresses an ongoing issue at the City College and I felt that limited seating in the cafeteria in the North Academic Center is one of the common problems students face. Therefore, that specific issue motivated me to write the memo.

The purpose of the memo was to address a problem on campus and offer a specific solution to my potential audience who is the President of City College. In this assignment, I hoped to have accomplished being able to persuade the president because it was quite difficult trying not to express my feelings without sounding too insulting or demanding. I hope that by stating reasons of why limited seating is negatively affecting the students can convince my audience. The context of the memo was limited seating area in the NAC cafeteria and the solution for this problem was that the college could use other places on campus to renovate it as another cafeteria or a sitting area for students. Since I am a student as well, the relationship between the medium and my audience is that often times when I leave class, I can barely find a place to sit at and that creates an overwhelming situation for me. Sometimes I want to do my homework or eat my lunch and it is harder to sit outside or in the hallways. I have also noticed that many times during the afternoon; students get lunch in the NAC cafeteria, they wander around the cafeteria and cannot find a place to sit. Therefore, I realized that everyone faces the same problem as me. Since my audience is the President at City College, I believe that Dr. Vincent Boudreau should be able to fix the problem.

This memo assignment has helped me reach the course learning outcomes in several ways. Firstly, I was able to enhance my drafting and editing strategies because I used the feedback I received from Professor Clark to review my essay and fix the mistakes. Drafting my essay helped me get a fresh start on how to write and format a proper memo because previously I have never written a memo. This assignment has also assisted me in writing an essay that is involved of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. For this essay, I am supposed to write as if I am writing to the President of The City College about an important matter rather than just writing an analytical essay about a book. Even though the memo will not be sent to the president, I had to write it in a perspective as if I was actually writing to him. Therefore, I felt as if this assignment enhanced my writing experience more with a type of writing that I am unfamiliar with.