Technical and Professional Writing
Engl 402 Fall 2017
Employment Project
This assignment is worth 15% of your total grade and will be completed individually.
Grade breakdown:
Audience Analysis (due September 1): 2%
Portfolio (due September 15 at 3 p.m.), consisting of:
Cover Letter/Personal Statement: 5%
Resume/Curriculum Vitae: 5%
Reflection Letter: 3%
Overview:
This project serves as an introduction to cover letters, personal statements, resumes, and curriculum vitaes, which are typically the first technical and professional documents an employer will see from you. The concepts introduced in this project serve as a rhetorical foundation for design that will be applied in future projects, and your final documents should demonstrate an awareness of, and the ability to apply, concepts from the readings and class discussion.
Assignment:
Choose one of the jobs advertised at either WSU Jobs
https://www.wsujobs.com
or Couglink
https://wsu-csm.symplicity.com/students/
and create a cover letter and resume for the job. For those interested in graduate progrms you can, as an alternative, choose one of WSU's graduate programs and create a personal statement and curriculum vitae for the graduate program. You must have the qualifications for the job you choose--you cannot fabricate qualifications to address the requirements.
Original drafts will be created in class (see schedule). Preexisting documents will NOT be accepted, and use of preexisting documents will be grounds for a failing grade. Our goal in creating new documents is to learn, from the ground up, how these documents are constructed, and to give you the opportunity to play with different arrangements and conceptual presentations.
Audience Analysis
As part of your preparation for creating your application documents, you must fill out an Audience Profile Sheet (pages 85-87) and write an analysis of your audience. The analysis should be in academic essay format, double-spaced, and must be a minimum of one page, with an appropriate heading. The audience you will analyze is whomever will receive and read your employment documents. The analysis paper will be written to the instructor.
Reflection Letter
In addition to including the application letter and resume, or personal statement and curriculum vitae, you must include a letter reflecting on the process you went through to compose your documents, describing which design principles are used in your documents and how they are used, and what you learned from composing the documents. You may also want to comment on what further work you might need to do to make your job application materials even more effective.
This letter should be addressed to the instructor in his role as instructor; a little research should yield appropriate contact information for the instructor.
Required Contents of Portfolio (with clear labels)
1. Reflection Letter
2. Job Ad or Graduate program information
3. Letter or Personal Statement
4. Resume or CV
5. Copies of your original drafts and peer-reviewed drafts. You are welcome to include in this appendix any additional materials you feel will demonstrate learning.