Letter of Complaint Exercises

See the audio transcription below:

Welcome to my Reader Presupposition: Complaint Letters activity. Check out this excerpt from the training video I did for the New York City Department of Education. And the last activity in the writing skills category is called Reader Presupposition: Complaint Letters. OK, presupposition, listener presupposition is thinking about your listener and using that knowledge to choose what you're going to say just like reader presupposition, thinking about your reader and having that knowledge change how you're going to write something.

So, you need to keep in mind what you know, but what maybe your listener or reader doesn't already know. Or what would be interesting to your listener or reader. Or in the case of this activity, I have my students write a complaint letter where they are making a request and so, you want to come across as two ways: you want to come across as honest, so that whoever gets the complaint letter believes you, and you want to come across as reasonable, so that they would be more likely to give you what you're asking for. And it starts off with an actual complaint email that I wrote a few years ago. And I go over it with my students, and step-by-step I show them how you see how I worded this here, see how that makes me sound reasonable and why it makes me sound reasonable. Or look what I put in here, it's to make me sound more honest. And then they do their own complaint letters and that's one of my favorite activities. Thanks for viewing my description of my Reader Presupposition: Complaint Letters activity. If you like what you've seen here, please click and subscribe to my channel. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but my web guy told me it's a thing!

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