Just as with all writing, integrated writing is more successful when you have considered the intended audience and appropriate register for the assignment. The added challenge here is that the audience and register of the original sources may differ from your assignment and may even vary between the sources themselves.
This means that as you mentally prepare to write for your specific audience, you need to consider the audience of the source and make some adjustments to fit a new context. As you learned in the last integrated writing chapter, you can change the wording through paraphrase, but you should not change the meaning itself.
Exercise 2: Integrated Writing (Audience/Register Focus)
1. Below is an email sent to all employees in your department. Read through the announcement of the change to the policy.
Effective January 1st, the vacation time policy will be updated. The original policy stated that employees could arrange for shift changes and coverage independently. After arranging for a coworker to be available during the scheduled shifts, employees would communicate with the supervisor of the changes. Those changes could be made up to 24 hours prior to a shift.
Due to misuse of the more flexible policy of the past, all employees must now schedule their time off two weeks in advance with the supervisor first. This will allow for the supervisor to make adjustments to the schedule and to post the updated schedule to the breakroom board and the online schedule well in advance.
This change will allow supervisors to be better aware of who will be in at any given time and to have greater control over equality. Supervisors will be able to balance out hours to keep things fair between employees of similar experience and to make sure we are never understaffed. We are also hoping to better align with the policies in the corporate office by making this change.
Please feel free to contact your supervisor directly if you have any questions regarding this policy change.
2. Now listen to a voicemail left by one of the employees you supervise.
3. Write an email to your boss explaining the situation. Offer a solution to the problem with the change in policy.