This assignment is to create a blog post and tweet using the following instructions. No sources needed, must use own words!!
Written Message 3 will test your ability to plan, organize and communicate a routine message effectively using two social media platforms.
Scenario: You work for Bundle, a local company that provides tech support to small businesses. Every three months, your company holds a Saturday of Service to encourage employees to give back to the community in various ways. Each Saturday of Service corresponds to a season and supports a different cause. Last quarter, your Summer Saturday of Service focused on Georgetown City Park, where volunteers mulched plant beds, replaced faded signage and painted picnic tables. For the upcoming Fall Saturday of Service, Bundle will work with your area’s Habitat for Humanity chapter, which builds new homes, rehabs older homes and does home repairs. All construction/repair materials are provided, and Habitat’s expert site supervisors will lead volunteers through the specific tasks, helping them develop new skills while contributing to the construction and repair process.
You’ve participated in every Saturday of Service the company has held during the past three years and always enjoy the opportunity to help your community and spend a few hours with co-workers away from the office. In addition to participating in the event, you’ve also volunteered to spread the word about the Fall Saturday of Service by writing an internal blog post encouraging co-workers to participate and writing a tweet encouraging community members to do the same.
Your tasks: Write a tweet announcing the Fall Saturday of Service and encouraging community members to sign up by visiting this sign-up page: http://bit.ly/3tgT497s. You can imagine the sign-up page has full event details. Then write a blog post for your company’s internal blog about the Fall Saturday of Service encouraging your co-workers to participate in the event. Give them a sign-up deadline and an easy, electronic sign-up method. Note the two different platforms and audiences for your messages. See Written Message 3 Hints below for help creating and organizing this content.
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Written message instructions: Create a Microsoft Word or Google document, and in it, write the tweet and blog post described in the scenario above. See Written Message 3 Hints below for tips on doing your best work.
Research on the topic: You may need to do some basic research to learn about the message’s topic. More on that in Written Message 3 Hints below.
Plan. Write. Edit. Revise. Proofread.
Formatting instructions: Place the tweet as the first item in your document. Skip a few spaces beneath it, and write the blog post. Include in your document only the tweet and blog post. Single space all text, and leave a blank line between paragraphs. Do not indent paragraphs. Make sure your blog post has a title, author name (yours will do, or you can invent one) and date. You should view other blog posts to see how this information is presented (there are a few different ways to format these details; any way you like is fine) before completing this assignment. Click here for an example of how your document should look.
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Written Message 3 Hints
Your tweet and blog post must demonstrate good business style on the sentence level and in overall organization. They must also show your ability to adapt to different audiences and social media platform expectations. Below are planning tips and reminders:
Tweet
Your tweet’s primary goal is to announce the company’s Fall Saturday of Service to the public and encourage people to sign up for it. The tweet should engage and interest readers. Using you-attitude is key, and the tweet’s tone should be conversational and natural. You can start with a statement, a question, even a fragment. Remember that your audience consists of your Twitter followers, so you can assume they are already interested in your content.
Your tweet must do more than simply state Our Fall Saturday of Service is coming up. Visit http://bit.ly/3tgT497s to sign up. Instead of simply stating that point, use the tweet to engage with readers and persuade them to sign up for the event.
The tweet must include the sign-up page’s URL http://bit.ly/3tgT497s. It does not have to be incorporated within a sentence, as shown in the previous bullet point, but it can be. Remember that the sign-up page, which doesn’t actually exist, would give the public full event details, so your tweet does not have to explain everything. It should, however, give basic event details like the time and date.
Remember the tweet’s length guidelines. 280 characters means 280 letters, marks of punctuation, and/or spaces, which includes the URL given in the previous bullet point. If you write your tweet in a Google document, highlight it, click Tools-Word count, and look at the number after Characters. In Microsoft Word, highlight your tweet, click on Words: in the lower left corner of your page, and look at the number after Characters (with spaces). That number must be 280 or lower.
Blog post
The blog post’s main goal is encourage your co-workers to sign up for the Fall Saturday of Service event.
Do some basic research (Google searches will suffice) to learn about any aspects of the topic you need more information about, but put any information you find via research in your own words. When you write the blog post, it should sound like it’s coming from you, not from the internet. As long as the information you find via research is available in multiple reputable sources, it is acceptable to use it without documentation, but you must use your own words when writing the blog post. Copying information word for word from any source(s) is plagiarism, and your message will be checked for plagiarism when it’s uploaded to Moodle. One of the best ways to avoid plagiarism is to write without looking at a source you found via research.
Organization, as always, is key. Start on an engaging note, and place the main Fall Saturday of Service details and the need for volunteers in the first paragraph. You will have to invent many of details such as date, time/length and location of the event. After that, write a middle paragraph or two of explanatory details focusing on the tasks people will do and where. Also give a persuasive reason or two to encourage participation (think intrinsic motivators, not extrinsic ones). In the last paragraph, tell readers what you want them to do next, which is sign up for the event. Since you’re writing this message as a blog post, give readers a quick, easy, electronic way to do so, such as a sentence like Click here to sign up…, and include a sign-up deadline.
Also use good paragraph-writing skills — make sure each paragraph has a strong topic sentence and occasional transitions within paragraphs to connect ideas (when all ideas in a paragraph are clearly connected, the paragraph is said to have coherence). Words like also and another are common transitions that can appear at or near the beginning of a sentence when adding on to a previous point. Another way to create coherence is to clearly refer to/build on a previous sentence’s point, like this: The swimming pool was closed for the winter even though the weather never got cold. Once it was opened for the summer, the neighborhood children spent every day there from sunup until sundown.
Overall, the blog post should provide all details readers need to know in a detailed, easy-to-read message. Paragraph length may vary. Each one should be brief and easy to read but detailed enough to adequately communicate your point. Though there is no “right” number of paragraphs, 4-5 should be enough. The first paragraph can be written well in three to five sentences. The last one can be written well in two to three sentences. As for the sentences within, conciseness is important but will not be graded as strictly as it was in the first two written messages.
Consider formatting elements such as bold headings on paragraphs (with the exception of the first paragraph) to help make the blog post’s content easier to read.
Using a natural, conversational tone is key since it will engage readers and make them want to hear more from you. Use writer focus only when necessary. Use you-attitude, but do so sparingly and effectively. In other words, not every sentence has to contain the word “you.”
After you’ve drafted the blog post, re-read it to make sure you’ve addressed all of the sentence-level business style concepts listed in the Business Style Checklist, especially a natural/conversational tone, specific detail, positive emphasis, you-attitude, and simple, straightforward language
