To: Emily Leung
From: Brian Wang
Date: November 24, 2019
Subject: Peer Review of Memo on Writing Effective E-mail Messages to Professor
Dear Emily,
Please see below for my feedback on your memo to Evan Crisp regarding effective email writing to professors.
First Impression
Your memo to Evan Crisp is concise and straight forward. Your have pointed out all necessary points of weakness in Evan’s email. Great job!
Organization
How you organized the summary points is very effective as it breaks an overwhelmingly long summary down into two lists. This definitely helps the reader in understanding the content of your summary. However, it is difficult for me to trace each tip back to the original issue in Evan’s email. This memo is a great piece of general advice in writing email but can be more helpful to Evan if you let him know which area your advice is referring to.
For example, the following guidance is very helpful: “Addressing the professor by name and title with a polite salutation. In this case, using “ Dear Professor Lambert” instead of “Hey there” would be more professional and appropriate.”
Introduction
The introduction section does a good job in employing a YOU attitude. It shows Evan an appreciation for reading out and sympathetic in recognizing the stressful time he is going through. The ending sentence also shows what the reader will get after reading the memo which prompts the reader to keep reading.
Writing Style
The writing style of the memo is professional and has minimal use of “you” and imperative verbs which can be seen as talking down at the reader. This effectively mitigated Evan feeling threatened from getting judged by his work. The writing style of the memo also accomplished another aspect of YOU attitude by showing appreciation for the reader, Evan, in the introduction paragraph. Great job Emily.
Grammar
No grammar mistakes spotted.
Overall a great piece of memo that employed writing with YOU attitude. I hope you find my feedback helpful and if you have any questions please let me know by email (brian.wang@alumni.ubc.ca).
Emily’s Memo: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2019wa/2019/11/22/lesson-3-1-memorandum-to-evan-crisp/
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