To: Jobina Tominga
From: Amy Vergouwen
Date: November 22, 2019
Subject: Peer review of writing with you-attitude Assignment
First impressions
Your memo to Evan Crisp was organized and friendly and provided useful tips to improve professional writing to professors. Your memo demonstrated your understanding of the you-attitude form of writing and did not contain many errors. You did a good job of providing constructive criticism towards Evan. Please see my suggestions regarding improvement for this assignment below.
Organization
There are an unnecessary amount of spaces between your “Subject” and the “Introduction” section of your memo. Only one space is necessary between those sections. Otherwise, the way you broke down your intro, suggestions and conclusion is well organized.
Introduction
Your intro is short and to the point. There are no problems with it as you clarify what your intent is with the memo and what you attempt to provide for the recipient.
Suggestions
The suggestions you provide are helpful and to the point. Adding examples instead of just stating how Evan could improve is a nice gesture. After you suggest that Evan should express his interest in the class, you state “The professor has most likely dedicated their career to the class topic and may be insulted if you show no interest”. Although I agree with this, I do think it is a bit discourteous to Evan and borders the line of being unprofessional in your memo. I suggest you reword that portion of your memo and change the language to make it a more approachable comment. In your suggestion “Refraining from asking for favours when you are the one asking the professor for a favour”, your tone is a bit accusatory and I would also suggest rewording this comment as well.
Conclusion
Your conclusion sums up your memo well. When you provide your email and inform the recipient that he can reach out for further help, it shows your readiness to help a classmate who is struggling with professional writing. In your conclusion, you use the phrase “incorporate (or incorporating) you-attitude” in back to back sentences, so you could consider finding synonyms or rewording one of the phrases.
Spelling/Grammar
I didn’t find any major spelling or grammatical errors.
Concluding remarks
Overall, your memo was well done and followed the guidelines of the assignment. I believe that with these suggestions, your memo could be improved.
- Fixing the spacing issue from the subject to the introduction
- Eliminating the accusatory language in the suggestions
- Removing the you statements in the suggestions
- Finding synonyms so that the conclusion is not repetitive
I hope you find these suggestions helpful. Good work in helping Evan create a more professional email for his professor.
Link to Jobina’s assignment: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2019wa/2019/11/21/3-1-memo-to-evan-crisp-2/
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