For those of you who may notice, yes I'm late getting my reading responses done. So don't get confused when you see me writing about topics we learned about two months ago. That being said...
Memos are the vanilla in the business world. They are written everyday to convey information and to request permission to continue a project. A memo has a certain style. No indentation, a specific greeting, introduction, information, request, and closing statements. The audience for a memo can be a boss, employees, or co-workers. The point is share information quickly with staff or group.
This week there was a lot to read about memos in the workplace. Personally, I felt there should have been more examples in the readings that were specific to our projects. I did enjoy the owl page on how to write memos, but it did seem as if the memo they had there was completely different than the memo we needed to write. I also found the whole idea of the memo a little comical because of the movie “Office Space”. I really felt that my team’s memo did a good job of covering all points that were necessary for the memo to be complete.
Almost every office sitcom on tv talks about "memo's." Maybe one character describes getting a memo from another or sending them one, but I never really knew what a memo was or how it tied into the show or of cpourse the correct format for writing one until now. I always thought it was more of just a note written to someone, but I realise now that its really more formal and important than this.
I really enjoyed this reading because I remember learning about Memos in high school. They are a lot more personal than you would expect them to be. The reading reminded me of the formats of memos and the importance of them to help those in an organization stay on task at hand. I also thought about how much memos have lost their importance in the work place and in organizations because of emails and the social networking/digital world. Memos are still very important and I enjoyed the reading as well!
Not having a large amount of experience with memos, I realized that a memo is a whole lot more personal than I would have expected. For instance, before reading this article I thought a memo were things such as weekly updates for a company. But I now understand that a memo must have a direct problem with direct solutions that are meant to be personalized to the reader. From this article I see that a memo is somewhat of a briefing of a problem and how it is being attacked for a solution.
I thought that the reading on Memos was very interesting and beneficial. In the article, it discusses the importance of a memo and its content. The article states the importance of knowing your audience and the purpose of the memo. It then goes on to talk about the parts of the memo and how is should be addressed to the person in a certain format and formal. The article said that if you address the president of your company as “Maxi” on the golf course you should still address this person in a formal manner by using their name.
This weeks readings had mostly to do with writing memos. In the readings I learned where to use a memo and for what purpose they are used. They are used to bring attention to problems and to solve those problems. We wrote our memos this week to do exactly that. We found a problem and then came up with 3 solutions. This weeks readings on memos also taught us the different parts of a memo. The guidelines to writing a memo, found on Purdue's OWL webpage where very helpful when it came time to write our own memos.
OWL's information about memo writing was helpful in completing our team memo. I found the sample memo especially helpful. The only thing I would have added is for the page to have more sample memos.
On Wed. we read about the importance of classifying the audience and the role that "hidden" readers play in a white paper. I thought it was interesting as I have never written a white paper, but was planning on only writing to the unskilled reader. However, while this reader should be the main focus as the audience, I do have to keep in mind the other dimension of there being hidden readers.