Topic: Recommendation memo about improve environment
Type of paper: Essay (any type)
Discipline: Natural science : Environmental science
Format or citation style: MLA
Description
Since the Unit 2 Research Project is a condensed project spanning a limited amount of time, you will not be required to write a formal recommendation report. Instead, you will be writing an abbreviated version in the form of a recommendation memo. You will notice that much of the content discussed in Chapter 18 is included in this memo.
A rough draft of your recommendation memo is due at the end of this week. Since it is unlikely that you will have many results, conclusions or recommendations yet, those sections might only include preliminary notes.
This week should also be used to read Chapter 8, which discusses communicating persuasively. You will be expected to apply your understanding of this chapter’s key concepts in the remaining work for English 402.
You should also use this week to gather information for your Unit 2 Research Project. As you work on your project, make sure to take notes on your proposal’s plan of work section indicating your progress on those tasks.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding your project, make sure to contact your instructor.
Now, let’s take a look at the required content of the recommendation memo.
Recommendation Memo
A recommendation report is very similar to a completion report. A completion report is, quite simply, the report one writes at the end of a project.
That said, there are many, many different types of and approaches to memo and report writing, but they all share certain categories of information. All completion reports, whether they are for the private, corporate sector or for academic and research-oriented audiences, have the same purposes.
Those purposes are:
To define or address a professional problem either of a research or practical nature.
Note: These are, for lack of a better word, “special” problems, not the everyday, garden-variety kind of problem one encounters at work (e.g. the printer needs a new color cartridge, the assistant manager is stuck in Chicago because of thunderstorms). These “special” problems are those that have been defined in some type of a proposal, informal or formal (such as the formal proposal you wrote), written or oral. This is the stage where you find yourself at the moment; you have a special problem that you have proposed to a particular audience, they have given the go-ahead for the work, and they are now or will soon be expecting some review of what that work accomplished.
To explain what work was done to solve or address the problem.
To conclude what the work means.
To make recommendations for future work, if necessary.
Content Overview for the English 402 Unit 2 Recommendation Memo
Let’s take a look at the required content for your recommendation memo. You’ll see that there is some overlap between the sort of content included in your research proposal and this recommendation memo.
Please note that the main question(s) each section answers have been identified.
Purpose
What is the purpose of this piece of communication? See pages 108 and 373-374 for more information.
Summary
What content is included in the memo? The summary covers the major elements of the recommendation memo, but is brief. Again, remember that the summary is an extremely important element of the memo as it might be the only content reviewed by your readers in their initial review of your memo.
Introduction
What problem or problems did the proposed project address? You can recycle some of the content from your proposal’s introduction in this section, but it should be revised and polished content.
Research Methods (Tasks)
What work was done? How was it done? What exact steps were completed and what was the rationale for each step? This section is written to show the reviewer that you adhered to the plan of work you presented in your proposal.
Look back at the example proposal on pages 436-442. Now take a look at the example recommendation report for that same research project which begins on page 487. Notice how the authors have used the same task organization as in their proposal to organize the content in their recommendation report? You will also use the same task organization in your recommendation memo in order to review the work you completed for your Unit 2 research project.
Results (Tasks)
What did you find out? What did you learn? This section should provide a thorough discussion of the results of your primary and secondary research. Again, take a look at the sample recommendation report’s results section. Notice how the task organization is used again here. Feel free to include a Limitations of the Study section between your results and conclusions sections. This section can be helpful if your study encountered issues that might limit your recommendations.
Conclusions
What do your results mean? This section should talk about the information that the researcher has collected and what it means–what are the relationships among pieces of information? Are there trends? Do anomalies seem to exist? What seems wrong or different from what was expected? In essence this section answers the questions- What did you do to research this issue and what does that mean? You must draw conclusions based on the data you collected. The section reveals what the work means and why it is important.
Recommendation: What recommendations can you offer based on your conclusions? You might expand upon your recommendations by explaining how the recommendations you make might be implemented. It focuses the special attention of the reader on what might happen in the future.
Works Cited/References: This list is the same as it would be in an academic paper of the sort you have been writing for years. It is a list presented in bibliographic entry form of all of the secondary sources that you may have cited in the memo.
