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To: Professor Wetzel From: First Name Last Name Date: February 2018 Subject: Audience and Focus on Problem Versus Solution in the Proposal Genre

This memo aims to compare genre differences between three different proposals, referred to as the Greendale Class Size Proposal, the TMC Garden Proposal, and the MSU Financial Literacy Proposal. Overall, this memo illustrates that the audience of a proposal influences whether the proposal talks about the problem or solution more, demonstrating the importance of knowing your audience when you are writing a proposal. By analyzing the differences between these three proposals, I am gaining a better understanding of the proposal genre, which should help me be able to write an effective proposal. Focusing on the effect the audience has on the structure of the proposal in terms of the amount of problem and solution seems to fit the demands of finding out more about the proposal genre. Audience and Proportion of Problem to Solution After analyzing the three proposals, I have found that a proposal written to an audience who is more familiar with the topic will spend less time describing the problem and more time focusing on the solution, while a proposal to an audience who is less connected to the issue will be more equally focused on the problem and the proposed solution. Familiarity is defined by how closely connected the audience seems to be to the proposal. For example, there is a strong likelihood that the audience to the TMC Garden Proposal is familiar with the topic of a community garden because of the other gardens that already exist on the UC San Diego campus (such as Ellie’s Garden, the Half Moon Meadow, and the Mesa Nueva Garden) (2017). These gardens are all described on the UC San Diego Sustainability website. In this way, the audience already knows the reasons why a college campus can benefit from having gardens, and so this proposal spends proportionally less time talking about the problem and more time talking about the solution. Table 1: Number of Sentences Devoted to Talking about the Problem Versus Solution in the Three Proposals* Proposal Number of sentences focused Number of sentences focused on the problem on the solution TMC Garden 2 11 Greendale Class Size 11 10 MSU Financial Literacy 19 23 *For rules on how sentences were classified as either focused on the problem or the solution, see Appendix A On the other hand, Table 1 demonstrates that the Greendale Class Size Proposal and MSU Financial Literacy Proposal spend a similar number of sentences talking about the problem and solution in their proposals. This difference is because the audiences of the Greendale Class Size Proposal and MSU Financial Literacy Proposal are less connected to the issues that these proposals are discussing. For instance, the Greendale Class Size Proposal’s audience is the

college Provost (Edison & Winger, 2010). Since the Provost is generally concerned with many different happenings in a college because of his high authority, he might not be very familiar with the specific issue of class size in the ENG 101 class. Additionally, although it is not explicitly stated, it can be assumed that the MSU Financial Literacy Proposal was written to a provost or someone of similar standing in the college, and so this person might also not be very familiar or connected to the issue of a lack of financial literacy within the student body at the college. Therefore, it makes sense that these two proposals would have to describe both the problem and the solution in detail since the audience might not know that the problem even exists, and so they would also not know much about how to solve the problem. Moreover, this suggests that in the proposal genre, the more distant the audience is from the problem being discussed, the more evenly distributed the proposal should be between talking about the problem and the solution. Subsections and Proportion of Problem to Solution Another notable trend that I found when analyzing the three proposals was that whether or not the subheadings grouped together the problem and solution influenced the number of sentences devoted to the problem versus the solution. For example, the TMC Garden Proposal groups together discussions of the problem and solution under the same subheading “Motivation for Garden,” which corresponded to talking less about the problem and more about the solution (2017). Contrastingly, both the MSU Financial Literacy Proposal and the Greendale Class Size Proposal had separate subheadings for discussing the problem and the solution, which coincided with a more even distribution between sentences describing the problem and sentences describing the solution. These findings suggest that proposals that have separate subsections for the problem and solution tend to talk more evenly about the problem and the solution while proposals that group the problem and solution together into one subsection can be skewed to talking more about just the solution. Conclusion Overall, this memo demonstrates that the familiarity of the audience with the topic of the proposal influences how much space is devoted to talking about the problem and the solution within the proposal. This finding is significant because it illustrates the importance of knowing your audience when writing a proposal in that if you are writing to an audience who is familiar with the issues discussed in your proposal, then you can spend less time talking about the problem and more time talking about the solution. However, if your audience is more separated from the topic of your proposal, which is often the case when the audience is a person with a high level of authority, then it is necessary to go into detail for both the problem and the solution. Since the audience to my proposal will most likely be an administrator at Carnegie Mellon (such as the provost), similar to the Greendale Class Size Proposal and MSU Financial Literacy Proposal, I will need to discuss both the problem and solution in detail. It is also important to note that it will be necessary for me to include subsections on both the problem and the solution rather than grouping them into one section to ensure that I discuss the problem and solution evenly.

Appendix A Rules for Classifying Sentences as Focused on the Problem or the Solution Statements focused on the problem include sentences that talk about what the problem is and why it is a problem. For example, “Since reading and writing classes require high levels of interaction, intense feedback cycles, discussion, revision, and 1:1 conferencing, class size becomes a serious issue for our ENG 101 classes” would be counted as a describing the problem because it is talking about how it is a problem that the ENG 101 classes are large (Edison & Winger, 2010). However, a statement like “Students will take part in organic growing, learn about environmental sustainability, and create a stronger connection to Marshall College and the Marshall campus” would be considered a sentence focused on the solution because it is describing the benefits of the solution (2017). Sentences such as the one just stated, and others that describe the solution and why the solution would fix the problem were counted as being focused on the solution. Sections such as plans of action or feasibility were not included in the count of sentences focused on the solution. If a sentence seemed like it could be focused on both the problem and the solution, it was not included in the count for either.

Works Cited Community Gardens. (2017). Retrieved November 05, 2017, from https://sustainability.ucsd.edu/involve/gardens.html#Marshall-Community-Garden Edison, A., & Winger, J. (2010, February 16). Reducing Class Size in ENG 101, First Year Composition from 24 to 19. Retrieved November 5, 2017. MSU Finance Literacy Office. (n.d.). Retrieved November 5, 2017. Nelson, B., & Herrman, C. (2012, March 1). Thurgood Marshall College Community Garden Project Proposal. Retrieved November 5, 2017....