Here is my Formal Memo.
My formal memo is a memo addressed to all Home Depot employees. It is about a collaborative build that we are (hypothetically) doing with Habitat for Humanity. I chose to use this topic because I used to work at Home Depot. We did a non-profit build over the summer, so the process of putting it together was fresh on my mind. I used a lot of the communication problems that we had for my paper. I made sure not to make these mistakes. This was the easiest way for me to “cover all the bases” for this formal memo assignment.
To prepare for this assignment, I did the memo worksheet that we recieved in class. This was somewhat helpful when writing my formal memo. It helped me to outline the paper, but did not help a lot when I was actually writing it. When writing this memo, I probably spent more time trying to find something to write about than worrying about fonts and layout. It took me about a half an hour to outline the paper and to start a rough draft. It took another hour or so to write the final draft.
When writing this memo I had a lot of trouble meeting the page requirement. By the end of the first page, I had already addressed all of the required points for this assignment. I even added a couple extra ideas that I thought would be helpful. I also addressed every problem that I could think of that we had over the past summer at the Home Depot. Even after all of this, I only had half of the required text written. This is why it took me so long to finish the final draft. I did not want to put in a lot of extra information that was not relevant or necessary to successfully execute the goals of the memo. I felt that by doing this, it would make employees not want to read the memo anymore. It would not be good if employees did not get all of the necessary information for a Habitat for Humanity build just because they did not want to read the entire memo. This is a great program and I felt it would be a shame if people did not know about it because they were too bored or overwhelmed to finish the memo. However, I ended up just making up really long driving directions to the build site to fill space. I do not feel that this assignment was a very good use of my time. I believe that if you can say everything that needs to be said and be extremely clear when doing it, it should not matter how many words you write. To me, a shorter memo that still addresses all necessary points is actually more effective. This is because people are more likely to read something that they know will not take up a great deal of their time.
