English (Paper 1) Formal Letter, Formal Speeches and Expository Writing Compilation

Title English (Paper 1) Formal Letter, Formal Speeches and Expository Writing Compilation Author Lim Wang Sheng, School of Information Technology, Nanyang Polytechnic [CCA: NYP Mentoring Club] Date 18/4/2018 Table of Contents Page Number Topics Covered 2 Letter Writing – Writing letter of request and complaint 7 Speech Writing – Achievement Speeches and Event Speeches 15 Expository – Argumentative Essays 19 Expository – Discursive Essays In any formal speech, formal writing, and expository, your writing has to follow these guidelines as mentioned below • Get straight to the point (You don’t want busy people to spend time decoding what you are writing or the message you are trying to express.) • Formal language use (Some words cannot be used in the formal setting) • Be clear at what you are trying to express (By not being ambiguous) This compilation is free for students to share and modify for their own needs under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). I compiled speech writings together with the essays and letter writing notes.

Situational Writing (Formal Letter Writing) I chose to write a guide as I did have difficulties at the start remembering the formatting of the letter and anticipate similar problems to appear when future students study this topic. As I mentioned, in general, when given a formal writing question, you have to get straight to the point, in addition, a situational writing on formal document will require the following skills: • Showing your confidence [Especially when writing a proposal] • You need to appear very sincere [Especially when producing an apology letter or a proposal to a client] • Minimize metaphor usage [The reader is most likely busy and don’t want to spend time correlating metaphors with meanings.] • Write politely [Even if you are writing a complaint, you need to be polite] (The above tips can be ported to report writing and speech scripts, albeit, with a slightly different formatting. Just change accordingly.) Disclaimer: Any Events, Organization and People mentioned below are fictitious. Question 1: You recently came across a poster of the following content summary: ABC Polytechnic is planning to host Secondary School Students Coding Competition Event and you as the head of your Secondary School Programming Club is writing to your school principal on the following matters: • Administrative (Excuse on that day for school for the competition event) • Benefits (Why the school principal should let you go for the event) You may add any points relevant to the writing of the essay. In any proposal letter writing, I prefer the following order: • Self-Introduction • Exact Purpose of Letter • Description of Event • Convincing the reader • Concluding Statement Rearrange the order of points as you deemed fit but that is what I prefer.

Miss Chen Ming Xuan  (Name of Recipient) School Principal  (Position of the Receipt) XYZ Secondary School  (Name of Organization) Ang Mo Kio Avenue 120  (Address) Singapore 666666  (Postal Code) Dear Madam, I am John Tan, President of the XYZ Secondary School Programming Club. On behalf of my CCA’s highest hierarchy in the programming team, known in my club as “Elite Programmers”, I am writing this letter for permission to attend to an event namely Secondary School Students Coding Competition Event hosted by ABC Polytechnic. There will be 2 components for the event. On April 12, 2018, we have to attend a briefing for the event about competition marking criteria and requirements. On April 29, 2018, we have to go and present the software we created and in the afternoon period of the same day, the judges will judge our software product we created ourselves and award the prizes to the students. Unfortunately, such wonderful event for us to be able to represent the school’s coding society happens to fall on curriculum hours and we have to request to be excused from school to attend to the competition briefing and actual events. We are absolutely confident that we will get into the top 3 of the competition, given that “Elite Programmers”, which represents the school in IT competitions, has already won 3 competitions last year, given such a decisive and astounding record, we believe we will bring glory to the school if given such an opportunity to participate in the event. We also would like to bring up the benefits of such an event, setting aside winning the championship. Elite Programmers team consist mostly of seniors, who are about to graduate this year, we do not want to miss this great opportunity to form lasting bond before graduation. On behalf of the team, we strongly believe that it will be a wise choice for you to allow us to go for the competition, given our track record in representing the school and the benefits the competition can offer. Thank you for spending your time reading this letter. Yours Faithfully, John Tan Self-Introduction Event Description Purpose of Letter Convince Reader Conclusion

In this page, I will explain to you all how I write a complaint letter, as the name suggest, it is a letter written to feedback about bad experience. Question 2: You recently came across the following situation: The payment website of a company suffered countless of crashes since the start of the year and you are just one out of the many victims of the unreliable payment service. You were trying to make payment when you were consistently greeted by error messages which are not resolved till the point of time you decided to write a letter of complaint. You are to write a letter, providing the following information • Details on the problem • Suggestions for improvements In a complaint letter, I prefer the following order: • Self-Introduction • Reason for writing the letter • Description and Impact of Incident • Suggestions (If any) • Conclusion

Miss Chen Ming Xuan IT Director XYZ Company Headquarters Bedok Avenue 777 Singapore 239031 Dear Madam, I am Mr Tan, one of the many loyal customers of your company. I would like to bring to your attention to the unreliable and slow payment website your company is running which also caused many of my friends to complain how horrible the payment gateway is. The reason why I even use your company’s e-payment service is the perceived confidence in the system and great reputation for its convenience for the past years, unfortunately confidence in the system eroded gradually from the start of the year after the websites began to show numerous signs of serious bugs and slowdowns. The first time I began to see signs of problems is at the start of the year, when I was making payment to buy something from your company’s online store. As usual, I logged in with my username and password and started to surf for product. The website suddenly crashed and I saw an error message, asking me to refresh the site. The website then showed me an error message indicating the site is down for various technical difficulties. Just a while ago, my friend complained to me about a similar problem. She was trying buy something from your company’s payment system using the prepaid credit she previously bought, when an error code occurred and the website went down afterwards. I visited various forums when I discovered we are not the only ones with similar problems – there are literally thousands of posts on forums talking about this issue of your company payment website being unable to process transaction properly. As a dominant player in the utility software market, I would expect to see near flawless website operations on your payment system, that is – even if there is an error or problem, it will be resolved quickly and not appear again for months to come. With these persistent errors messages on your payment website, it