Note: Instructors can ask students to follow this entire four-part sequence or jump to specific assignments within the sequence:

• Resume
• Writing Samples
• Basic Personal-Professional Website
• Summary and Reflection

For this assignment series, you will create a collection of professional documents that you could use in your future job searches. You will complete each of the assignments below over the

course of our semester. 

Resume

Whether you already have a version of a resume or you are building one for the first time, this professional document can be a challenge, but it is likely the single most important document you’ll write for your career—and one you’ll revise frequently for the rest of your professional life. (Note: We will discuss the genre of the resume in class.)

Steps: 

1. Start by reading the Purdue OWL Resume Writing Workshop. Then find and read at least four additional credible online resources for resume writing. 
   
2. Draft your resume, considering the advice you read, our class discussion, and any other samples you’ve seen. Think hard about the language, “look,” and layout of your resume as they relate to your goals. For instance, do you want to be a designer in some capacity? Your resume might look different from someone hoping to go into engineering. What does your ideal employer hope to find in an employee? In what ways can you demonstrate these skills? (Note: Down the line, you will likely have different versions of your resume for different job applications—each emphasizing those features of your skills and experiences most relevant to that particular job—but you should have one “general” version for your field. This is the one you’ll write here and use for your website below.)
   
3. Gather feedback on your document from at least two people. One should be a classmate from this class. The other might be a Writing Center consultant or—even better—a Career Services advisor, or they might be a professional in the field you wish to pursue. 
   
4. Synthesize the feedback you received in a paragraph or two. (You’ll need this below!).
   
5. Consider what feedback is useful and what is less useful. Revise into a “final” version.

Writing Samples

Strong written communication skills are highly sought after in the professional world, and while many new graduates are preparedas writers, they often have trouble convincing potential employers of their writing skills for a simple reason: They don’t have appropriate writing samples. For this assignment, you must find (or create) three writing samples suitable to submit to a potential employer. There should be some variety in your samples. Including one piece of academic writing is fine (perhaps a history essay you’re particularly proud of, or a paper you wrote in for a political communications class), but the other two should be “professional,” as this is the type of writing employers are looking to see you demonstrate. Professional documents might include a proposal, some types of reports, memos, a formal letter, newsletters, organizational web writing, or others. (You should ask me if you’re not sure about a professional genre.) You absolutely may use revised work from this class as those professional writing samples if you think they represent your best work.

For each sample, you should write a brief “framing” sentence or two that provides an unfamiliar reader with some context about what it is they’re seeing. For example: “This is a press release about a new product launch that I had the opportunity to write in my 2019 internship at X company,” or “I wrote this set of instructions for a technical writing course in my third year of college. It demonstrates my ability to be clear, concise, and persuasive.”

Basic Personal-Professional Website

As new graduates, you should have a professional presence online. (This article—“Why Every Job Seeker Should Have a Personal Website, And What It Should Include”—does a good job at explaining why.) For this assignment, you will build this professional website for yourself.

How to Think About It
Your goal for this website is to obtain a job. I recommend building the site for your ideal post-graduation job, which means you’ll want to think about your dream (but still attainable) position and employer. You will write with this primary audience in mind. Read this article (“The Essential Components to a Great Personal Website”) to better understand why to build a personal professional website and how to approach it.

How to Build It
If you’ve never built a website, it might be a daunting task, but I promise it’s doable—and worth it! It’s important to be able to put together a very simple site for any number of professional reasons. 

If you already know how to build a website, go at it! If not, I’d recommend using WordPress, which is a free and very easy to use simple site builder. You don’t need to know how to write code, and there are a variety of free templates available. There are about a million tutorials online, both from WordPress and from users, but I’d recommend starting with this one if it’s the first time you’re using it. If you get stuck, come see me and I’ll walk you through the basics! (And you only need the basics—I promise!) Please note that you are welcome to use another platform, but if you get stuck, I won’t be able to provide support.

What to Include
At a minimum, your site should include the following pages:

• A Homepage – this should offer a welcome and some basic information about you. Most people also choose to include a picture, but this isn’t necessary if you’d rather not.
• An “About” page – this page usually offers a brief summary of you as a professional and often a few appropriate personal details—think pets, hobbies, interesting facts.
• A “Resume” page – this tab should link to a PDF of your final resume.
• A “Writing Samples” or “Writing Portfolio” page – this is where you’ll upload and frame the samples you gathered and wrote above.
• A “Contact” page – this should include, at a minimum, your email address and, if you have one, a LinkedIn account. If your other social media is appropriate (or particularly relevant to your job hunting), include those links too.

How to Improve it

Get feedback on your site from two people. At least one of these needs to be a professional who’s been in the workforce post-college for at least five years. The other could be a friend, a Writing Center consultant, a Career Services advisor, or a classmate. After both rounds of feedback, revise your site. Synthesize the feedback you received in a paragraph or two. (You’ll need this below!).

Summary and Reflection

Write a 2-3 page summary and reflection on your process and products from these professional development activities. At the top of your document, please include a link to your site. On the site, I should be able to view your revised resume and other deliverables noted above. At a minimum, in your summary and reflection, you should answer the following questions: How did you approach the resume piece—what steps did you take? Did you already have a version or did you start from scratch? What resources did you read as you began writing or your resume? How did you approach the formatting and style? What was challenging or easy about drafting it? Who did you receive feedback on your resume from? What kinds of advice did you gain from each? Who was your intended audience for your website? Who provided website feedback? In both cases, what did they say, and what pieces of advice did you follow (or not), and why? How did you choose (or create) your writing samples? In what ways do you think your documents are successful? What needs more work, and why? Do you anticipate keeping the site up to date and actually using it? (It’s okay if the answer is no!) What are the most important things you learned through this series of assignments? Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about the process or your final documents?

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Level: First-year Writing Students (see variation for in-major students here)

In this assignment you will be conducting an interview of your own to learn more about the writing that happens in a specific workplace and position. You’ll conduct a brief (< ½ hour) interview, preferably in person, with a working professional, asking him or her about their writing and their development as a workplace writer. Just as the Archive explores writing in a variety of fields and positions, you can too; your interviewee can do any kind of professional work (they do not need to have “writer” in their title, since we all know that writing happens in all jobs!).

Who to Interview?

Who you interview is up to you, but of course the most beneficial interview will likely be one that is conducted with a writer in a field you have at least some professional interest in joining post-college. Although you might know personally a seemingly great person to interview, I urge you to seek out someone you have not met in the past. The reason for this is twofold: First, if you already know them, you can ask them about their work any old time. Second, making new contacts in your desired field is always beneficial. You never know what might come of a great conversation. So, instead of interviewing a family friend who works in a field you’re uninterested in (even though interviewing him or her would be “easy”), try to expand your network. You should consider a “dream” interviewee based on your professional goals, and then use your current network to seek out professionals in that field or position. [Note to Professors: An in-class networking call might help too. Just because Ann doesn’t know someone working the government, that doesn’t mean her classmate in the next row doesn’t. Allowing students to use one another as a network to seek out interviewees can do a lot of good.]

Preparing

In preparation for your interview, you should:

1. Contact your desired interviewee (as early as possible to allow for scheduling complexities!) in a professionally written email [Note to Professors: an in-class discussion aboutthis genre and examples will serve your students well here] and schedule a time to talk, either in person (preferably) or via Skype.
2. Listen to 2-3 interviews in the Archive (or read the transcripts). Make notes about what you learned that is relevant to you as a future workplace writer. What surprised you? What questions were the most interesting to you? What do you wish the writer had been asked?
3. Prepare your questions. Your questions do not have to align with the questions in the Archive, but they should get at the same types of concerns, including:
   • Their job title, description, and primary duties
   • An overview of the genres the writer creates in his or her position
   • The writing process he or she follows
   • How the writer believes they learned to write in their job, including strategies or other opportunities for development
   • How he or she believes college writing prepared them (or not) to write in their current job, as well as what they wish they had learned or done as a student in order to better prepare

You should also feel free to ask other questions about the job that would help you envision yourself performing in it down the line. You should prepare approximately 8-10 open-ended questions.

4. Prepare your recording technology and test it. (Garage Band is a good option, and iPhone recordings are also fine!)

Post-Interview

Write a summary and analysis of your interview (approximately 1,500 – 2,000 words). Provide an overview of the significant points your interviewee made, using direct quotes when useful. (A good rule of thumb to determine when to summarize or paraphrase vs. when to quote is the question: Could I say it as well as they did? If not, use their language and quote them.) Then, consider your current preparedness to do the types of writing that your interviewee performs. Are you familiar with the genres of writing they described? How would you approach one of the less familiar forms if you were tasked with writing it? What’s complicated about the genre? What seems similar or familiar to other writing tasks you have completed in the past? What questions would you need to have answered in order to successfully tackle such writing? Are there specific things you believe you can or should do, based on your conversation with this writer, to best prepare yourself for your own eventual professional writing?

[Instructor Notes: Depending on your goals, you might consider asking students to transcribe their interview, or not. You might adjust the post-interview writing to better serve your specific course objectives, and you also ask students to present (in a formal manner or not) about their findings. If not, an in-class debrief would likely benefit the class and allow them to discuss not only their findings, but also their experiences. Finally, you might also choose to add or adjust the writing assignment below.]

 

Additional Post-Interview Writing Assignment [optional]: Comparison/Contrast Essay

Now that you’ve completed your interview with a workplace writer, you’ll write a comparison/contrast piece relating it to one of the other interviews in the archive. Your audience here is other first-year writing students who want to learn about the writing that takes place in two arenas and gain a better understanding of the complexities of such writing (as well as how to best prepare to complete it).

Ultimately what we’re most interested in here is how writing genres, processes, and rhetorical situations (goals and audiences of texts, at a basic level) are similar or not between jobs. You might choose to compare your interviewee’s experiences to a writer in a similar field in the archive, or you might choose a writer that’s very different. Both options could yield interesting results.

You’ll want to be as specific as possible in your analysis, and that means honing in on one or two elements of writing transfer that interest you here. There are many directions such a paper can go, and we want a focused comparison/contrast, not a rambling list of what one person said as opposed to another person. You might consider the following questions to help you narrow your focus:

• What genres are the two writers working within? (More on genre here.) What makes them unique to this industry/organization/position? What’s complicated about them?
• What audiences are the two writers writing to? How does this shape their writing?
• What are the writers attempting to accomplish in their writing?
• How are the writers’ processes similar or not? Are differences a product of organizational constraints/opportunities or are they more personal preferences?
• How prepared was your interviewee to enter the workforce as a writer? What kinds of experiences did they have writing in college that effected this preparedness?

Finally, you don’t want to simply tell your reader what one writer said as opposed to another writer. You want to compare your area of interestbut also provide some insight and analysis about it, including how this audience of first-year students might begin to think about their own professional writing trajectory from the university to the workplace.

 

 

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