Strengthening the Ethics and Visual Rhetoric of Sales Letters

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE PROVIDES details about a comprehensive assignment for teaching sales letters in a business communication course. During the past 5 years, this assignment has evolved, moving beyond one that focused almost exclusively on strategies for making the letter persuasive, and therefore effective, to an expanded form that devotes time and attention to the ethics and visual rhetoric of the letter. In addition to composing a sales letter, each student is required to write a detailed, thoughtful analysis of the ethics and visual appeal of his or her letter. THE EXPANDED SALES LETTER ASSIGNMENTPart of the revised sales letter assignment comes from the textbook for this course. Lehman and DuFrene (2005) instruct students to write a sales letter to someone in their age group about a product they have used and are sold on. I expand this assignment as follows:Write a sales letter about a product or service that you have used or subscribed to and can recommend highly. You will write this letter for someone in your age group. Your letter should demonstrate your command of the guidelines you have learned about content, organization, style, audience, ethics, and visual rhetoric. Finally, when your letter has been completed, write an analysis (300-400 words) of the ethics and visual rhetoric of your letter, outlining the strategies you used, your reasons for choosing those strategies, and any ethical implications of the strategies you chose. This assignment will be evaluated as follows: Content, Organization, and Writing Style-60%; Design-20%; Analysis of Ethics and Visual Rhetoric-20%.

Revisiting a Genre

“…As is the case with all visuals, infographics are inextricably intertwined with ethics, as many communication scholars have already noted about visuals and data displays (Kienzler, 1997;Rosenquist, 2012;Stallworth, 2008;Tufte, 2003). Because visuals generally earn more importance and emotional impact than their textual counterparts, many visual creators can easily mislead their audience (Kienzler, 1997).…”