Recommendation Request
To: Susan Curtis
From: Andrew Chin
Date: 2/15
Re: Recommendation Letter Request

Hello Mrs. Curtis!
My name is Andrew Chin and I was in your Accounting 201 class from the spring semester of 2015. I am in the process of applying for an internship at RSM and I would deeply appreciate it if you wrote a letter of recommendation for me. It’s an accounting internship starting in December of 2017 at the RSM office in Chicago and I wanted to get my recommendation letter from you because I did very well in your course in which I learned material that directly correlates to what I will be doing at the internship.
The date the letter needs to be sent in via email is March 15, 2016 at 11:55 pm to the address rsmwinterintership2017@rsm.com. The subject line should just say “Chin, Andrew” and please put a header in the actual email with your name and credentials before the letter.
If you are unable to write the letter, I understand and I still appreciate everything you’ve done for me while I was your student. Otherwise, allow me to thank you in advance for the time spent fulfilling my recommendation request.
Would it be beneficial for me to send you a reminder a week before the deadline?
Yours Truly,
Andrew Chin

Complaint Letter
To: Amazon Customer Service
From: Andrew Chin
Date: 2/10
Re: Faulty product, Replacement required

On January 2, 2016, I purchased a Pentel GraphGear 500 Automatic Drafting Pencil Brown (PG523E) from the Amazon webstore. The pencil cost $15.99 and I am returning it to you via UPS standard shipping due to various malfunctions it had when it arrived.

Right upon the initial use of the product I noticed that there was a strange cracking sound that came from the tip of the pencil whenever the lead dispenser was pressed. I had drawn no more than six lines with it when the metal tip was launched away from the rest of the pencil followed by a severely malformed spring. The rest of the pencil seems to be in good condition but the spring is a crucial part for making it function, and I would like to have it replaced.

I am requesting that a new pencil be sent to me to replace the one I am sending back, free of charge. My permanent address is 2448 Cimmaron Drive 75025 Plano, TX and my online amazon account username is andrewschin9@gmail.com

I would deeply appreciate you processing my claim within two weeks.

Sincerely,

Andrew Chin

Peer Reprimand
To: Ben Kim
From: Andrew Chin
Date: 2/15
Re: Clean your mess up

Hey Ben,

I’ve noticed you’ve left a considerable amount of clothes around our room for the past few weeks and I just wanted to let you know it’s becoming a bit of a hassle. It’s difficult to find a lot of essential small items like my icard, keys, wallet, earbuds, batteries, pens, pencils, clips, contact lens cases, and erasers when there is a constantly shifting mass of fabrics that covers the room every day.

I know you have lots of school work on your plate and being in Chemical Engineering more or less destroyed your social life, but I sincerely believe that everything will suck much less if we have a clean and organized room to live and work in. You’ll have more space to sprawl out on while studying, you’ll finally be able to find matching pairs of socks to wear, and I’ll stop being late to class every morning. I’ll even help you clean if you tell me when you are free on Monday, Tuesday, or Friday of this upcoming week. If you choose to ignore my plea and continue to leave the room in a state of disarray, I will have no choice but to sell your belongings on Craigslist at atrociously discounted prices.

Your loving roommate,

Andrew Chin

Email Interview
After interviewing my former Abercrombie and Fitch job manager, Elliot Burley, about what his work emails tend to look like I learned that he receives over 40 emails every day but only reads about 6 or 7 of them immediately.
According to Elliot, he immediately reads any emails from his supervisors, coworkers, and shipment companies but reads the remainder of his work emails throughout a one or two week period from when he receives them. In his own words, “The rest of the emails are usually a few customer complaints and then a bunch of little updates on nationwide sales and upcoming product changes.” Elliot explained that any relevant update information was faxed to him bi-weekly anyway, so he felt little need to stay vigilantly on top of those emails.
As for the customer related ones, he confessed that he redirected almost all of them to Human Resources or Customer Service. Apparently very few people send in much more than a vaguely worded complaint with little to no context. When asked how often he received “well put together” emails, he replied that he rarely saw well written emails outside of the ones his supervisors send him; and even those had occasional typos or awkward phrasings.

SEND
SEND, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, is a concoction of practical advice and observations about what to do and what NOT to do when sending and receiving emails. Despite being almost a decade old, the insightful examples of awkward requests and cringe worthy ignorance given my Shipley and Schwalbe are still relatable in the modern day.

By being upfront and blunt about the limitations and advantages of emails, Shipley and Schwalbe show their readers clearly defined pitfalls and successes when it comes to writing efficiently while still maintaining the human aspect of communication. One of the most notable statements that the authors made regarding email was that it has “sped up our world, but our correspondence patterns remain the same.” This sentence is particularly insightful because it sets the reader up for understanding that emails require just as much human touch as other forms of communication albeit with their own set of rules.

Shipley and Schwalbe continually remind the reader to avoid technical fallacies such as lack of concision or not putting enough information into a single email, in order to emphasize the need for efficiency when we are using emails. According to them, emails have a stigma surrounding them that makes them feel more burdensome than other forms of written communication which means that each email should contain as much relevant information as it can without rambling, in order to make the job of responders as easy as possible i.e. don’t treat emails like text messages where there are a lot of short phrases and one word responses that get sent.

Furthermore, Shipley and Schwalbe mention that it discarding empathy and liveliness in our emails causes us to lose a lot of our effectiveness in communicating. This is an essential idea throughout the book and the authors go into great detail about how to aptly show emotions and humanity via emails in a variety of situations i.e. how formal is too formal, when should exclamation marks be used, and why using all capital letters is a sin.

In conclusion, SEND is more or less a comprehensive manual on sending and receiving effective emails that speed up communication and mitigate misunderstandings. David Shipley and Will Schwalbe do an excellent job of pinpointing the mistakes that people make on a regular basis and provide practical solutions to them through a variety of examples of anecdotes.