More Résumé Stuff

Syllabus Quiz

Logon to Moodle for your syllabus quiz, which starts at 3:35 pm and closes at 3:45.

Résumé Essay Requirements (DUE Feb. 7tht)

• Four full pages (word processed, 1-inch margins, 12pt font)

• Briefly state what you want from a hypothetical or real job

• Explain your background--educational and professional--to your audience (me)

• Extremely Important:  Convince the audience that you're the ideal candidate for the position.

By "convince" I mean make an argument for your being hired.

With a partner, please look at the following résumé examples and critique them based on your readings for today:

Résumé Examples

Bad, Better, Alternative (remember, the alternative is to be used if you need more space).

Here’s a link to Peter Profit’s cover letter.

Some Questions

• What's the purpose of a cover letter?
• What's the purpose of a résumé?
• How does one show he or she is the ideal candidate?

In case I haven't said it enough, you should aim to show, not tell in your cover letters and, where possible, in your résumés.

Career-Related Study

Webpage Stuff for the Semester

Remember, I want you to maintain your webpages for the rest of the semester. This, at minimum, means updating your webpage every week. Each week you ought to add something or change something on your webpage. The goal for this exercise is to keep you engaged with a (possibly) new, unfamiliar technology we can refer to as a class.

In order to "encourage" updating, I'm asking that you create a separate webpage that will list your weekly changes. I'm not asking for major changes--don't think you need to have a search engine or active server page to fulfill this requirement. Simply adding links, changing colors, creating a journal pages, etc. is enough to fulfill updating.

First, you should create a new page for your updates. I know, let's call in 'update.html.' Of course, you'll have to have it linked to your homepage (index.html)...any questions?

After today, I'm not going to spend much time on webpage creation. I'll always be available to help you during office hours, but we won't focus on webpage creation as a class after today.

Things to consider and/or do today

• What is technical communication?

• Who needs to understand technical communication?

• Where (in what industries) do we find technical communication?

• What's a primary audience for technical communication? Secondary?

Lessons on Plain Language Next Week

Next week we'll be talking about more sentence-level, prose concerns. The goal of the lessons will be on understanding what is meant by "efficient prose" and "plain language." In order to get us going, please have the Revising Prose document read. Originally, I was going to put this on Blackboard, but it's just as easy to do it here.

Technology Journal

Don't forget about the "Technology Journal." I have five prompts for you to write about this term. This week's prompt is up (as are all the others), so please take a look.

Don't Forget--Your Cover Letters and Résumés are now due on Tuesday (2/14).