Unit 3 Reflection 

I enjoyed Unit 3’s assignments very much, especially the business letter & complaint letter. I also had a lot of fun reading instructions about “You Attitude assignment”. I think the theme of this unit is to study the “business tone”. When we communicate with others in the workplace, it is important for us to consider our audience. If we want to maintain a business or professional  relationship with our audience, then we should adopt an appropriate tone, even when we are complaining something that they did.

First, in the “You Attitude Assignment”, we were writing at a position that offer help/recommendations for others. When we are recommending others what they can do or cannot do, we shouldn’t make our audience feel like we are instructing them what they should or should not do. Eliminating the pronoun “you” can help us achieve this aim. Reflecting on this matter, I do agree that the difference between ” You should say this..” & “It is recommend that adding xxxx…” is large, the latter does sound more polite and less condescending. This intrigued me because I think there’s more tricks in emlinating the pronoun “you”. I learned in one of my English class that, if we delete the pronoun, then  our tone will be imperative. For example “Close the door!” , “Be Quiet”. Now after a second thought, even we add a pronoun to these kind of phrases, our tone is still imperative : “Close the door, you!” In my perspective, the tone is not so much about whether we use the pronoun or not, but how we phrase our message. For example, if our context has determined that we are in a position offers help/recommendation, then eliminating the pronoun means we want our message to be less personal.

Second, in the “Business Letter & Complaint Letter” assignment, I learned that when discussing personal issues, the pronoun “you” or “I” should be used occasionally. The trick here is to figure out whether you want the audience to focus on you, or them. I tried to balance between the use of “I” and “Your company” in this assignment, because I think if I focused too much on what happened to me, I will get my audience defensive, as I am writing a complaint letter. In responding to complaints, I tried to build goodwill by using gift card and apologies. I think people are more willing to let the issue go if they get some true benefits. Otherwise, customers can always sue a store that are mean to them, and with the use of social media, customers can also let other people resist to buy stuff in that store.

Third, in drafting the final report assignment, I am kind of frustrated to see how I only got 13 responses (now 20) from the survey. I thought I will at least get 50 responses, because my survey is concerned with how students could learn better in the program. I guess not many people is interested to have assessment in non-traditional classrooms.

Finally, I really want to say thank you to my peer review writer Catherine Yu, who have wrote a very detailed and sincere review for my draft. I learned more ways to analyze data from her peer review, at first, I thought the data section is just to bring the result, but now I think I can combine my literacy review (what I learned from my secondary source) to analyze my primary source.