This week the ESL students will combine the English writing skills they have learned so far this semester and begin to compose practical business documents. The first business document is an office memo.
Business Memo Writing
A memo is a business document that communicates information to people inside the company or to customers. Memos are typically written in an easy to read style. They are not academic research papers nor are they letters.
Here is a sample memo with typical format. Most memos have these features:
- a top section with the receiver’s name, the writer’s name, the date and subject
- the content, often divided by bold headers
- a close with a name and signature
- a reference to any attached documents
Memo Writing Assignment
This lessons helps ESL students develop business writing skills. These skills will be useful to any student who works in an environment that communicates with international clients and customers in English.
Specifically, the students will:
- learn data analysis and interpretation skills by identifying patterns and changes
- practice summary writing by describing important patterns and changes in text
- develop critical thinking skills by explaining changes in patterns
- create a business memo by using a standard memo format
The data for this assignment comes from Korean food consumption figures.
Instructions for the Students
In this exercise, the student is a research assistant working for Pizza Hut. In this scenario, we pretend there are no Pizza Hut restaurants in Korea, however, the company is thinking about expanding into Korea.
Before any financial decisions can be made, the company needs background information. One part of that research is an understanding of food consumption patterns in Korea, past, present and future.
There are four tables of data. For each table, the students will write two paragraphs. One paragraph will describe key patterns and changes from the past to today. To simplify the task, we will examine only two years of data: the oldest year and the most recent year.
The second paragraph offers some reasons that might explain the cause of these changes.
One paragraph will be written to summarize changes for all data. A final paragraph or two will offer the some ideas about future trends in food consumption.
Write the report in a standard business memo format.