Write a formal report on the communication issues raised by
the case study “Cross-Cultural Negotiation: Americans Negotiating a Contract in China.”
Context
You work as a business-student intern for the Major Vehicle Component Company (MVC), based
in Graball, Alabama. Chief negotiator Mr. Jones, still frustrated by his inability to set up a joint
venture in China, has asked his assistant, Artimus Pyle, to compose a detailed post-mortem
report about the trip. Pyle is pressed for time, so he has asked you to review the available
documentation (the comments of Jones and Wang), to report on the issues and problems
surrounding MVC’s trip to China, and to recommend a course of action that focuses on an
improved understanding of cross-cultural communication. Pyle will rely on your analyses and
recommendations, possibly by incorporating them into his final report to Jones.
Consequently, you must review the course of the preliminary negotiations, as evidenced by the
comments of Jones and Wang; you will also have to determine what went wrong, causing the
several misunderstandings that seem to have occurred. Shape your findings into a formal report
to Pyle, and make any recommendations that you see fit. He has invited you to think this matter
through and to express your views freely on what happened and what should be done. He has
also indicated to you that he will take full responsibility for the decision whether or not to adopt
your views and to incorporate them into his report to Jones.
Purpose
Your purpose is informative, analytic, and persuasive: you are not only reporting on and
analyzing information but also suggesting and recommending courses of action to be pursued by
your organization. Consequently, your analysis demonstrably has to yield good reasons for your
recommendations. As with any persuasive document—positive or negative—you need to think
carefully about appropriate tone, effective organization, and overall coherence.
Audience
Your primary audience is, of course, imagined: Artimus Pyle of MVC. However, remember that
in this case you also have a strong secondary audience in place (Mr. Jones). In both cases, your
instructor forms another audience level to consider.
B. Formal Requirements
Format
The format for the final assignment will be that of a formal report. Follow the format,
conventions, and suggestions set out in Locker/Findlay, chapters 10 and 11, especially pages 278
ff. (“Writing Formal Reports”). Your reference for the basic conventions is the model (“Slam
Dunk”) included in that text section.
As Locker notes, while formats vary more or less widely according to corporate or institutional
cultures and conventions, some fairly widespread general expectations must nevertheless be met.
You must conform to these expectations; in particular, ensure that your final document has at
least the following (again, following Locker and Findlay, Fig. 11.8):
Title Page
Memorandum of Transmittal
Table of Contents (see below)
List of Illustrations (if applicable)
Executive Summary: Write this as an “informative executive summary”
(see Locker/Findlay, pp. 283-86)
Body
Works Cited (MLA format)
Appendices (if applicable)
The body (i.e., the main text, excluding transmittal and summary) of your report should be
between 1000 and 1250 words. Like the rest of your report but unlike the sample report in the
textbook, it must be double spaced. This length is short for a formal report, but it is more than
sufficient for the purposes of this exercise.
A couple of things follow from this relative brevity. First—perhaps most importantly—
completeness will not be possible for this case. Rather, you should choose two (three at most)
major issues and write your report as if those points were all that you needed to address. For the
sake of coherence, you should narrow your focus to two or three key points and to report on
those thoroughly rather than try to do too much. As your textbook indicates, the conventions of
formal reports allow you to formalize this issue by specifying limitations on the scope of your
report.
Second, your Table of Contents will necessarily need to be adjusted to reflect whether, and to
what extent, you include the “if applicable” sections noted above. You should also adjust it to
reflect headings, sub-headings, and so on. You should let your inclusion of visuals or use of
headings be determined by the nature of your analysis: ask yourself whether visuals, headings,
and sub-headings will help you to make your case effectively. If you answer yes, then use them;
if you answer no, then do not use them. The body of your report does not need to open with all of
the introductory categories discussed by Locker and Findlay. Only three are necessary:
“Purpose,” “Scope” (wherein you can address limitations), and “Definitions.”
C. Research Component
For this final assignment, you must find, use, and include appropriate reference to at least three
sources outside of the actual case report, at least two of which must be from print-based (i.e.,
paginated) sources. You can use the electronic version of a text, but it must also exist in a print
format.
To find acceptable sources for this assignment, I encourage you to use the Western Libraries
website, starting at the homepage and following this sequence: “Research Guides,” “Business,”
and both “Country Research for Business” and “Articles for Business.” Please keep in mind that
your purpose involves cross-cultural communication. In the context of this course, your expertise
is communication, so you should report on the communication challenges arising from the case
(rather than on, say, the feasibility of opening a branch plant in another country).
Resources
Locker/Findlay, chapters 10 and 11; lecture notes for Units 10, 11, and 12; and the case study
“Cross-Cultural Negotiation: Americans Negotiating a Contract in China.”
Assignment Format
Formal Report (Internal)
Word Count
The main body of your report, excluding front and back matter, should contain between 1000 and
1250 words (double-spaced). The memorandum of transmittal and executive summary should be
approximately one double-spaced page each (i.e., 250-275 words for each document). If they
exceed one page, do not allow them to go beyond the halfway point of the second page.
Evaluation Criteria
The following elements of your report assignment will be evaluated:
• form/design
• sentence grammar, structure, clarity, and cohesion
• coherence (paragraph level and global)
• completeness (thoroughness and depth)
• persuasiveness
• awareness of audience
Assignment Value
40% of the Final Grade
Due Date
The final draft of your report is due by 11:55 p.m. of the last day of classes (Thursday, December
5).
ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR ASSIGNMENT 3 (FORMAL REPORT)
Genre
Locker and Findlay identify and discuss three basic types of formal reports: information reports,
which collect and present data; analytic reports, which not only present but also interpret data;
and recommendation reports, which recommend a course of action to solve a particular problem.
This assignment is a recommendation report, but it also presents and analyzes information: trying
to make sense of his company’s failed trip to China, Jones has requested a report detailing what
happened, explaining why it happened, and offering recommendations for avoiding similar
problems in the future. This threefold purpose will affect how you compose paragraphs and
structure your report (subjects addressed below in “Body: Paragraph Composition” and
“Recommendations”).
Style
Reports use a formal style, avoiding contractions and informal language (slang, idiomatic
expressions, and unnecessary metaphors). With the exception of the transmittal message—where
you directly address the recipient—reports should not use first- and second-person pronouns.
Instead of writing “our trip to China” or “our company,” write “MVC’s trip” or “MVC.”
Typically, reports are self-explanatory, including all definitions and documents needed to
understand the recommendations. For instance, if you were actually writing this report for MVC,
you would include the comments of Jones and Wang as an appendix. For the sake of this
assignment—because you know that I have copies of their comments—you need not include
them. You must, however, include definitions of key terms, placing them in the introduction of
the report.
Repetition is a feature of the formal report. Because reports are often long (much longer than this
assignment requires), readers usually look only at sections directly concerning them. As a result,
the most important information often appears verbatim in different parts of the report. For this
assignment, the recommendations can appear verbatim in the transmittal message, at the end of
the executive summary, and at the conclusion of the report.
Structure/Content
Front Matter: Memorandum of Transmittal
Unlike your previous transmittal messages, which featured no more than three sentences, this
memorandum demands six short paragraphs: an introduction identifying the attached document;
an explanation of the context out of which the report arose; the recommendations (which you can
copy from the end of your report); a note on matters of special interest (e.g., emphasizing the
most important recommendation); a note on opportunities for further research (relevant matters
that you could not cover in this brief report), and the goodwill ending thanking the reader for
giving you the opportunity to write the report. Like the body of your report, your transmittal
the message will be shorter than it would be for an actual report, but you should still compose the six
discrete paragraphs expected for the transmittal message. Because of the severe restriction of the
word limit, most of these paragraphs can contain a single sentence.
Front Matter: Executive Summary
After you have written the transmittal message, this part of the report might seem superfluous,
but it differs from the transmittal message in two significant ways: its audience and its purpose.
The audience for the transmittal message is the individual who commissioned the report, but the
audience for the executive summary is anyone who reads the report. In the case of your report,
Jones and Pyle are intimately familiar with the context for the report, so you do not need to
provide the same level detail that you will in the second paragraph of the executive summary,
which will be read by some people who know nothing about this particular trip to China. Another
difference involves the presentation of the recommendations: for emphasis and ease of access,
the recommendations will appear twice in the executive summary, at the beginning (in a concise
sentence) and the end (in a detailed bulleted or numbered list). As indicated above, the formal
report has a threefold purpose of describing what happened, analyzing why it happened, and
offering recommendations to avoid similar problems in the future. If the executive summary is
framed by the recommendations, the body reflects the first two purposes: the first body
paragraph will describe what happened, and the second body paragraph will introduce the
evidence informing the analysis and leading (in the final section) to the recommendations. As
Locker and Findlay indicate, the second body paragraph will offer the rationale informing the
recommendations (“Because …”).
Body of the Report: Introduction
As Locker and Findlay indicate, the introduction typically contains a series of brief sections:
Purpose and Scope, Assumptions, Methods, Limitations, and Definitions. Because your report is
brief, you need only to include three sections: Purpose (in this case, to identify the problems, to
analyze their cause, and to make recommendations about how to resolve them), Limitations
(which implicates the scope of your analysis), and Definitions.
Body of the Report: Paragraph Construction
Because your purpose is persuasive—you are trying to convince your reader to accept your
analysis and to act upon your recommendations—you should open each paragraph with a topic
sentence that not only identifies the subject but also makes a claim about it. In subsequent
sentences, validate that claim by discussing relevant details from the case. Keep in mind that
your purpose in the body paragraph is to describe what happened and to analyze why it
happened. Each body paragraph should, therefore, focus on a specific problem, describing it and
indicating why it arose. You will refer to the case when describing an incident and to your
secondary sources when analyzing the problem (see the note below on integrating sources). At
the end of the paragraph, you should conclude with a sentence that sums up the discussion but
that does not simply repeat the topic sentence. An effective report—even a brief report, like this
one—will lead the reader through a series of stages. In this case, you will compose a series of
paragraphs, each one dealing with a specific communication problem. Avoid page-long
paragraphs and paragraphs that contain more than eight or nine sentences: the longer the
paragraph, the greater risk of redundancy (the unnecessary repetition of assertions or the inclusion of superfluous examples) or incoherence (the introduction of a second related-but distinct topic). Try to keep your paragraphs between five and nine sentences long.
Because the appropriate place for the recommendations is the end of your report—where they
offer the solutions to the problems that you have described and analyzed in the body—you
should not make recommendations in the body of the report.
Body of the Report: Recommendations
For the purposes of concision and emphasis, your recommendations can appear in a numbered or
bulleted list. If you want to stress the relative importance of your recommendations, use numbers
to organize your list. If your recommendations are of equal importance, use bullets. Page 289 of
the sample report offers a useful format for your recommendations: a concise, bolded
recommendation followed by supplementary comments.
Again, the recommendations can appear verbatim in the transmittal message, the end of the
executive summary, and the conclusion of the report.
Back Matter: Works Cited
Follow the MLA format discussed in Part VI of The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. For a short
report like this one, you can place the works-cited entries on the same page as your
recommendations (do not, however, copy the APA format appearing in Locker and Findlay).
NOTE: INTEGRATING SOURCES
Each body paragraph of your report will feature a discussion of relevant evidence. Incorporating
evidence into a paragraph is a three-step process: you introduce the source, you present the
source (whether through paraphrase or quotation), and you comment on the relevance of that
evidence. If you follow this process, you will avoid the mistake of opening or closing a body
paragraph with a quotation or a paraphrase. You must always comment on the relevance of your
quoted or paraphrased source to your argument; if you conclude a paragraph with a quotation or
paraphrase (or turn immediately to another piece of evidence), you leave your reader to try to
figure out the relevance of that evidence, an ethos-damaging approach to formal writing.
Integrating Sources: Paraphrase
A paraphrase deals with a specific section of a work. Unlike a summary (which deals with the
work as a whole), a paraphrase is approximately the length of the original text. A two-hundred page book can be summarized in a few sentences, but a paraphrase of a two-hundred-page book
would be approximately two-hundred pages long.
An effective paraphrase
will open with a signal phrase that identifies the author and title of the work;
will close with a parenthetical citation; and
will be written in your own words: it must not replicate either the diction (word choice)
or the syntax (word order) of the original.
Example: Recent studies place the Baroness’s work at the center of American modernism. Irene
Gammel suggests that the Baroness created the sculpture “God,” a sculpture previously
attributed to Morton Schaumberg. Moreover, Gammel speculates that the work,
fashioned from a plumbing fixture, directly influenced Duchamp’s seminal work
“Fountain” (56).
Paraphrases—especially those containing assertions—that do not open with signal phrases can
confuse the reader. In the examples below, I cannot determine where the student’s voice ends and
the source’s begins:
The tedious and tiresome dialogue of Waking Life is a veritable wall of words that is
almost immediately wearying and soon yawn-inducing (Thomas 21).
Rowling’s book contains powerful social commentary regarding the consequences of
racial, social, and class intolerance (Martin D10).
Unlike quotations, paraphrases do not have their own punctuation marks unambiguously
indicating where they begin and end. For the sake of clarity, you must open a paraphrase with a
signal phrase identifying the author and closing with a parenthetical citation of the page number
(both the case study and your academic, secondary sources are paginated, so each paraphrase
should conclude with a parenthetical citation).
Integrating Sources: Quotation
An effective quotation
will open with a signal phrase identifying the author;
will close with a parenthetical citation;
will transcribe the source accurately; and
will be integrated into the sentence in a grammatically correct manner.
How to Quote Sources
1. Quote judiciously, using only the words and phrases necessary to convey the author’s point.
Avoid block quotations (quotations longer than four lines of text), especially in shorter
assignments like this formal report.
2. Always integrate quotations with your own words. Do not leave a quotation stranded between
two of your sentences.
Avoid the following approach:
Some scholars object to the unjust characterization of Emily Dickinson’s poems as the
sentimental effusions of a retiring spinster. “Emily Dickinson is the female de Sade, and
her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic
imaginist” (Paglia 624).
An effective revision will add a clear transition in the form of an informative signal phrase:
Some scholars object to the unjust characterization of Emily Dickinson’s poems as the
sentimental effusions of a retiring spinster. Camille Paglia calls Dickinson “the female de
Sade” and regards her poems as “the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated,
sadomasochistic imaginist” (624).
3. Do not collapse your voice into another writer’s, as in the following example:
Dickinson’s poems are not, as many believe, the sentimental effusions of a retiring
spinster; they are “the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic
imaginist” (Paglia 624).
Again, an effective integration will announce the transition to a new voice with a signal phrase:
Dickinson’s poems are not, as many believe, the sentimental effusions of a retiring
spinster; instead, Camille Paglia regards them as “the prison dreams of a self incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist” (624).
4. Punctuate your quotations properly.
(a) Use the ellipsis to indicate that you have deleted information within the passage that you have
quoted:
In her recent edition of Little Lord Fauntleroy, Ann Thwaite reports that “Fauntleroy’s
true character is overlaid . . . by the clothes, he wears, by the hair that curls to his
shoulders, and by the sweet girl actresses who played the role on stage” (v).
(b) Brackets allow you to insert words of your own into quoted material. You can insert words in
brackets to explain a confusing reference or to keep a sentence grammatical in your context:
Irene Gammel reports that “Greve [who would later achieve fame as a novelist under the
name Frederick Philip Grove] staged his own suicide and suddenly departed for America
via Canada with the Baroness” (13).
5. Integrate quotations in a manner that is grammatically correct:
The first example, in which an independent clause introduces a quotation, constitutes a comma
splice:
At the beginning of the second part of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the narrator lauds the
master’s decision to place the physically robust Tom with the spiritually evolved Arthur,
“Constant intercourse with Arthur had done much for both of them, especially for
Tom” (304).
When you use an independent clause to introduce a quotation, place a colon between them.
The second example is an incomplete construction; the second verb (“departed”) lacks a subject:
Irene Gammel describes “suddenly departed for America via Canada with the
Baroness” (13).
To correct this error, add the appropriate subject:
Irene Gammel describes 1908 as a pivotal year in the life of Elsa’s companion, who
“suddenly departed for America via Canada with the Baroness” (13).
REVISION CHECKLIST
These categories appear on the Writing Studies Grading Rubric (which appears among our
course Resources), and for each category, I have added questions related to the formal report.
As the rubric indicates, these categories constitute the evaluation criteria for your assignments.
PURPOSE: an unclear, vague, weak, or otherwise problematic thesis statement
Are your recommendations detailed and appropriate?
AUDIENCE: inappropriate linguistic register; incorrect assumptions about background
knowledge of reader
Do you use formal language throughout your report, avoiding first- and second-person
pronouns in every section but the transmittal message?
COHERENCE: problems with paragraph-length/structure
Do your body paragraphs feature topic and concluding sentences, and do you introduce
and discuss relevant evidence at each stage?
COHESION: lack of connection between ideas, paragraphs
Do your paragraphs follow a compelling sequence (e.g., climactic, chronological)? Does
each one dealing with a specific communication problem related to your recommendations?
STYLE: lack of sentence variety, awkwardness, faulty sentence structure
Do you avoid unnecessary wordiness, faulty parallelisms, and misplaced modifiers?
GRAMMAR: sentence-boundary errors, punctuation, sentence mechanics
Does your report contain fused sentences, comma splices, sentence fragments,
incomplete clauses, mixed constructions, dangling modifiers, inconsistent punctuation, or
ambiguous pronouns?
PROOFREADING: typos, misspellings, and so on common enough to significantly slow down
the reader.
FORMAT: poor document design for technical writing assignments; incorrect essay format
Is your transmittal message a memorandum? Have you doubled spaced your assignment?
CITATION: problems with proper citation format, scholarly procedure
Do you introduce quotations and paraphrases with signal phrases? Do you cite your
sources accurately? Do your paraphrases change both the diction and the syntax of the
original?