This assignment entails writing a sales letter. The midterm is a sales, or “pitch,” letter. Let’s focus on each of those words, the second first. It’s a letter, not a memo. A memorandum is, usually, a communiqué between persons already acquainted and in some manner of official cahoots with one another.

Writing a sales letter.

REQUIREMENTS: • 4-5 pp. single (1.0)-spaced pages, making sure you’ve hit the “remove space after paragraph” option – a minimum of 1600 words, NOT counting the bibliography; • in Times New Roman font (!!), size 12 pt (!!!); • minimum of 8 sources, the majority scholarly (peer-reviewed) or “gray” (hard statistical data from .gov [and suchlike] sources); • at least two paradigms; • written in straightforward, clear English. The midterm is a sales, or “pitch,” letter. Let’s focus on each of those words, the second first. It’s a letter, not a memo. A memorandum is, usually, a communiqué between persons already acquainted and in some manner of official cahoots with one another.

Writing a sales letter.

The Latin word “memorandum” is, in fact, a passive periphrastic meaning “a thing to be remembered.” A firsttime sales pitch is not asking anyone to remember anything. It’s broaching a topic for the first time. Therefore, make the document a letter, the format in which an outsider would more typically introduce himself or herself. And the letter is a sales pitch: you’re trying to persuade your patron—by now an individual person with an individual title at a specific institution, within whose purview it lies to fund or ignore your project—to attend an oral presentation at which you will set forth, in greatly expanded form, the material you cover in the midterm.

Writing a sales letter.

The aim of the midterm is to persuade through a bravura display of writing, research, and organization. In it, you are the boss. Say “I”; say “my plan calls for X”; offer no options (“we could build a boat, we could make a hat, we could” &c.), but simply and forcefully articulate precisely what it is you propose, and why—on the basis of what clear, distinct ideas dictated and validated by research—you are proposing precisely that, not something else. This is what the book’s formulation about the document being a leadership statement that puts information into action by providing a research-justified solution to a well-defined problem means.

Writing a sales letter.

The book defines the six P’s quite well. I want to add only a couple of preliminary remarks about them here. 1. Your midterm letter should contain all six P’s, though its Price section will be brief and does not require any fulsome development here. (Basically, you need to know if your project is commensurate with your patron’s resources and budget. You need to make sure your proposal isn’t totally infeasible.) 2. The term “problem” should be construed in a broad, businesslike sense: it refers not, or not only, to some form of suffering or injustice—your project need not have any grand sociopolitical ramifications

Writing a sales letter.

But to a deficiency or inefficiency of some kind that is in some way impeding the better flourishing of a population (which may even include the patron, if your project is about how a patron is, e.g., losing money or failing to serve an available market niche). It is crucial to remember that the flourishing of that population must be something your patron, for- or non-profit, has some definable incentive to care about. Your reasons for proposing a plan must be predicated on practical enticements for the patron, not on ethical positions. This is true even when the ethical concerns are of the most pressing sort.

Writing a sales letter.

A for-profit institution will help a population if and only if there’s some kind of profit to be made in doing so. Nonprofits have mission statements and agendas; it is important to match the problem to the organization. 3. Paradigms are model approaches to your problem or to others with structural similarities—approaches (potentially) applicable, in one way or another, to your project. They supply you with the concrete and specific steps that make up your plan and establish the likelihood that your plan will succeed.  https://youtu.be/Ed7S4r7hrDY

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