English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

The main point of this weeks reading seems to be that you should always be aware of the audience and context when you are writing your instructions. This is an important aspect of the writing process because your main audience affects the depth and vocabulary of your writing. I know that if I was writing some instructions for my Grandma for instance, I would not use terminology and concepts that were beyond here general understanding. This ties into the idea of writing your instructions as if your main audience were “idiots”.

How is my tone?
Should i go into more detail with my experiences?

Since I have never really needed to write a cover letter before, I found this weeks readings very helpful. I know I probably would have ended up doing some of the things that the reading said not to do. The most important aspect about writing your cover letter, in my opinion, would be to make sure that you tailor your cover letter to the company you are applying to. If you know something about how the company works and the business ethic within the company than you can write your cover letter to accommodate these factors.

My conclusion, after reading all of these articles on resumes, is that resumes and cover letters suck. It just seems that we have to put sop much work into these documents, and it seems almost pointless. After reading the articles from the recruitment managers it seems like you have to make a perfect resume for these people. You put so much work into a resume just for it to be glanced at for maybe a max of one minute. It just does not seem fair that we have to put all of this time and effort into producing an effective resume for it to be discarded at the whim of the recruiter.

As I was searching for a job that would fit my skill set I realized that it was going to be a lot harder than I had originally thought. I could find jobs that required my basic skill set, however they all required some sort of prior experience in the filed, usually a substantial amount of time, usually around 3-10 years worth of relevant experience. After searching for awhile I finally landed on this one.

My biggest problem with writing any paper has always been the introduction. I know the basics of the introduction, they have been drilled into my head since high school, but that never made it any easier to write. I think my problem with the introduction has always been the attention getter. I always found the attention getter to be the hardest part of writing any paper. Thankfully, for me, the attention getter is not a part of technical writing. The six moves that were presented in this chapter should be a good tool to help with the writing of an introduction.

Before reading chapter 15, Starting Your Career, I never realized that there were two different forms of résumés, those two forms being the archival and functional approaches to writing résumés. In any class or any time I have ever attempted to write a résumé it has always been archival. The chapter makes it seem like this is the most used and requested type of résumé. I thought it was also helpful that the chapter introduced the functional approach to writing a résumé.