STEP 1: In both professional and academic writing situations, you will often find yourself tasked with bringing together information from a variety of sources. Simply peppering your message with direct quotes or hyperlinks is not an effective way to provide your audience with relevant, clear and simplified information. In fact, it puts the burden on the reader to make sense of the message. A key writing skill is the ability to paraphrase relevant aspects of the sources you wish to include in your message. Watch the video below on effective paraphrasing skills:
How to Paraphrase in Research Papers (APA, AMA) – YouTube
STEP 2: Let’s put your paraphrasing skills to work:
1. Pick a company in any industry that interests you. Imagine you are doing strategic planning for this firm, and identify one of your company’s key competitors.
2. Search through social media sources to find three strategically relevant pieces of information about this competitor, such as the hiring of a new executive, the launch of a major new product, or a significant problem of some kind.
STEP 3: Using Chapter 7 guidelines on writing effective emails, write a well-organized email to the CEO of your company explaining what you have found out about the competition, and then provide some recommendations about how your company can profit from/meet the challenge of what this other company is doing/has experienced. Make sure to follow email formatting guidelines, and make sure that your recommendations line up with what you found out about the competition. In addition, make sure to paraphrase only relevant information about the competition so that your CEO can relate your recommendations to your research findings. Since this is not an academic message, references and in text citations are not required.