The complaint letter is a text used in business and technical writing to formally dispute or protest unsatisfactory products, services, or laws.
More concretely, the letter initiates a complaint resolution process with a company providing a product or service failing to meet expectations. It may also initiate a complaint-resolution process with a government entity pertaining to a law, enforcement of a law, or non-enforcement of a law. Refer to lecture notes for more substantive information on this text.
The assignment has two primary components:
(1) identify a product, service, or law provided by a particular entity and perform an audience analysis. For example, if the issue is with a service provided by a phone service provider, an analysis will be conducted on the company. Similarly, if the issue pertains to a ticket, the analysis might concern the issuer.
(2) Prepare the complaint letter on an actual complaint. The complaint could be about any company or entity (i.e. property management company, electronics provider, government agency, or any other company who you have had an experience with warranting a complaint). In preparing the complaint, use specific content building information (as discussed during class) to motivate an audience in achieving desired consequence. The letter should make clear what desired consequence or resolution is sought and ensure the resolution is reasonable in its orientation.
The audience analysis should be prepared in memo form, addressing me in the TO field as audience, and will not exceed 200 words in length. The actual complaint letter will be prepared using the generic letter format and will not exceed one page in length. It will be addressed to the entity for which the complaint is directed. Both the memo and letter must adhere to proper discourse conventions and include an opening, middle, and closing. The evaluation of each will be based on ability to employ tenets underlying the technical writing framework.
Within this communicative framework are the following core tenets:
• Clarity - concerns whether writing is easily understood by Readers
• Concision - using few words predicated on an understanding between real and relevant ideas
• Precision - an exact approach to writing - making pragmatic, definitive choices
• Substance - effectively comes down to what writers are conveying to Readers
• Structure - organizational nature of writing, including sentences and arguments)
Please consider the following link for a sample audience analysis and complaint letter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RvxqrNOAL-QX08xDy02B8YGONJYi3bzqsCoqFPC_gec/edit?usp=sharing