Writing 310 Blog Post 1

This is an assignment for the Professional Writing class I'm taking. The description was: "Find an email, a social media post, or a portion of a document you have written within the last few months that you would be willing to share on your blog. Post the email or portion of a longer piece on your blog, scrubbing it of any identifying features. Next, analyze YOUR posted document by looking at the document’s purpose, audience, stakeholders, and context."

For this assignment, I chose an email that I sent for my job at the Crescent last semester:

Hello!

My name is Aidan and I’m a reporter for the Crescent. I’m emailing you on the recommendation of (other source) about (an article about an event taking place) this weekend. 

Since you (have a central role in the story,) I think people would love to hear some of your thoughts on (the story.) 

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to do an in-person interview because my schedule is pretty packed this week. However, I’d appreciate it if you’d be willing to share your thoughts via email.

Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll send some questions along. I look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,

Aidan Arthur

In this email, my purpose was to obtain an interview via further emails, and eventually to publish an article in the student paper. I succeeded in this, via a lengthy response to eight follow-up questions. This, along with other reporting, helped me finish my article. 

The audience in this document was a source closely involved in the story I was reporting who became a main voice in the article. The source's contact information was given to me by another person, as I mention in the email. Understanding the audience is usually an important consideration in professional writing, but in this case context was more important, as I explain below—partly because I didn't know this person. Understanding the context in which this communication was received gave me a minimal understanding of the source at the moment at which they got it, though not as a whole.

The stakeholders included me (as my job depends on meeting deadlines and putting out stories,) the student paper (as the editors were interested in publishing this story,) and (tenuously) the public who may have been interested in the story. Assuming that the source was actively interested in being featured, as their lengthy response seems to indicate, they may also have been a stakeholder.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of this email is the context. I couldn't have known where my source would be reading the email, but some other elements of the context were important in crafting this email. Firstly, I knew that the source would be opening an email from an unknown address, which is why I led with an explanation of my job and how I got his email address. Secondly, due to the nature of this story I knew that the source would likely be busy that week—as was I—which was a contributing factor to the brevity of the email as well as my explanation that an email interview would be more convenient. Similarly, I didn't include questions in the primary email, because I thought it might come off as overwhelming or overbearing. Instead, I proposed a secondary email in my last paragraph.