Step 1: The Writers's Self-edit

Self-editing has a significant role in the road to the goal a writer wants to achieve and it does not matter if it is writing a best-seller or obtaining a good grade for an assignment. The key part of writing is to make the intended message clear to an audience and while it is apparent to the writer, it could be seen as gibberish to the targetted audience.

The following posts will consist of a series of steps that enable me to view my own writing more objectively, so that I can make adjustments which will hopefully improve the end result. Furthermore, I will reflect on the steps taken and how they effected me as well as my writing.

The steps are:

 1.1 Taking a break!

 1.2 Read your paper aloud and role play the audience.

 1.3 Examine paragraph content and organisation.

 1.4 Self-editing Worksheet 2.

 1.5 Track frequent errors.

I will be reviewing the following three paragraphs I wrote for the Day Chocolate case study:

It was and still is seen as normal that fair-trade products are sold at a higher retail price as non fair-trade products, and this higher retail price is why fair-trade companies, such as Day Chocolate, do not reach sales rates that equal the sales rates of normal companies who obtain their resources at questionable prices. Therefore, Day Chocolate decided to sell their products at the same retail price as their non fair-trade competitors. By doing this, they enabled buyers to have the feeling of being ethically responsible without having to pay more than usual. This convenience assists customers to make the step from regular brands to a fair-trade brand.

     The strategy used by Day Chocolate is the penetration pricing strategy. Penetration pricing is a technique that uses a low price to attract new customers to eventually achieve a high turnover rate (Monroe 2003). But it only works if customers are willing to switch to fair-trade products, which is, luckily for Day Chocolate, a tendency that was initiated a few years ago due to people becoming more aware of environmentally and ethically responsible consuming.

     A major problem that Day Chocolate faces is the fact that the demand for fair-trade products is highly elastic, because of inexpensive non fair-trade alternatives. According to Alfred Marshall: “the elasticity (or responsiveness) of demand in a market is great or small according as the amount demanded increases much or little for a given fall in price, and diminishes much or little for a given rise in price". Here, highly elastic demand means, that a slight increase in price could lead to a considerable loss in sales and vice versa. Therefore, Day Chocolate had to establish a bond with their customers to ensure that they will stay with Day Chocolate even if the price would increase. Knowing this, Day Chocolate became active in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and the company even has its own Youtube channel, because nowadays there is no better way to establish and maintain relationships with customers than through the internet. By doing this, Day Chocolate created an exceptional bond not only between the company and its customers, but also between its suppliers and customers.