English 420Y - Business Writing Online

We recently lost all the blog categories on the site that organized Reading Response and Employment Project posts. Though they have now been restored, individual blog posts will now need to be retagged. This should be easy and quick, and it will assist us greatly in the grading process. Please click on "My Account" on the front page of the site and choose "View recent blog entries." Here, you can select each blog post, click on edit, and choose the proper category for each. These should be fairly obvious, but all the categories are also listed in the calendar.

This is the resume extravaganza activity. Open the file below, and read through all the resumes in no more than 10 minutes. As you read, pay attention to where you are looking on the resumes and how you are evaluating them. Choose 5 people you would call for an interview at a hypothetical company. In a blog entry tagged with the "Resume extravaganza" tag, list those five (by page number) and discuss the activity. What aspects of the resumes stood out? Why did you choose the 5 you did? How will this activity inform your own resume revision?

Now that you've written a resume, the next step is to flesh out that information in a cover letter. One of the biggest mistakes people make with the cover letter is just repeating information that can be found on the resume. What's the point of that?

I can see from the responses to the last instructor blog that many of you are now appropriately discouraged. Now I'd like to discuss ways to make you stand out from the crowd. Good application materials can help you score the job you want, or at least give you a fighting chance. The last thing you want to do is send out a mediocre or terrible resume. Without hyperbole, I can say that a resume is one of the most important documents you will ever produce. The irony, of course, is that it will be read in 10-30 seconds, and if you don't make that cut, you get thrown away.

Getting a job sucks. It can be one of the most frustrating and time consuming endeavors you ever undertake. Many people say that getting a job is as difficult and time consuming as having a job. I wish great job searches on all of you throughout your lives (as you'll probably have to undertake many, according to labor statistics), but if you have a rough job search experience, know you're not alone. When you look for a job, you are competing against hundreds, sometimes thousands of other candidates.

Welcome to English 420Y. This is a writing intensive course designed to introduce students from various fields to the principles of professional writing. Professional writing will be defined as the writing used to maintain and support institutions, including businesses, governments, non-profits, and the university itself. The course and its principles are grounded in rhetorical theory that students will be introduced to throughout the semester.