Writing a Letter of Complaint Exercise in PDF

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. Which brings us to the last activity in the category of impressions- Reader Presupposition: Complaint Letters. As I said in my training video for teaching social skills, listener presupposition, like reading presupposition, means thinking about your listener or your reader as you speak, or as you write. You have to keep them in mind. For example, you have information but you also have to think about what your listener or reader does not already know and needs to know and you need to give them that information. In the case of.

this activity where we are writing complaint letters, I have the students think about how they need to keep in mind the impression of themselves their words give to the reader. We start with an actual complaint letter that I wrote a few years ago where I felt like a hotel chain had made a mistake and I was due a refund. And we go over the letter together and I point out to my students how I'm really trying to get across two targeted impressions: I want to come across as honest, right?, because I want whoever is reading the letter to believe what I'm telling them, and two, I want to come across as reasonable, because if I seem reasonable they're going to be more likely to give me the refund that I'm requesting. Once we go over the letter, line by line, how this line makes me sound honest or look at how me saying this makes me sound reasonable, the students then are tasked with writing their own complaint letter, and they choose from one of two different circumstances and follow my format, always keeping in mind the targeted impressions: honest and reasonable. And it's interesting, whenever I do this activity students, because I tell them it's an actual letter that I wrote, students always ask me if I got the refund, if they gave me the refund. And I'll never forget, there was one student, very clever student, who when he asked me I said, “what do you think, do you think I got it?” And he said, “I think you did because otherwise you wouldn't be having us do this activity” and he was absolutely right. Thanks for reviewing 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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