Today’s Plan:
- Discussion of Brumberger and Lauer
- Sharing mediabistro job corpus
- Elementary coding
- Homework
Discussion of Brumberger and Lauer
I asked you to read their article and do two things:
- I simply want to know what in the article surprises you
- I also want to know what else you wished the author’s elaborated
You talk. I’ll listen.
Sharing mediabistro.com Job Corpus
Your first project this semester dovetails with a current research project I have been working on. As we revise UNC’s writing minor, I have been curious as to what skills and technologies to focus on. This curiosity led me to research job advertisements for English majors, and Brumberger and Lauer stands as the most recent and comprehensive study I found. However, their article focuses on “technical communication.” This designation can have many meanings–sometimes it is merely a synonym for professional writing. But not in their case–they use (as do I) in the more precise sense of developing documentation and working with scientific experts to communicate scientific/technical knowledge. Our department doesn’t have someone with those specializations–so as much as I appreciate their research, I wanted something a bit more targeted. Their research speaks more to folks at large research institutions with Professional and Technical Writing major, more specialized faculty, and software licenses such as MadCap Flare or Adobe RoboHelp. We are a much smaller department with 4 tenure-track faculty (and none of us, I think, would claim Professional or Technical writing as a core specialization).
So I’ve turned my attention to Professional Writing jobs outside of technical writing (in either of the forms I’ve traced out above). During my research, I came across a specialized job listing site–mediabistro.com. From their “About Us” page:
Mediabistro is the premier media job listings site and career destination for savvy media professionals. Whether you’re searching for new job opportunities, striving to advance your career, or looking to learn new skills and develop valuable expertise, we are here to strengthen and support your professional journey. We have the tools and resources to help you navigate your own path and find career happiness.
In addition to job postings, mediabistro.com offers resume services and courses on professionalization and personal brand building. Rather than turning to a more popular site like monster.com like Brumberger and Lauer, I used mediabistro.com because it focuses specifically on jobs involving writing and communication.
I spent the month of June scanning every job ad posted to mediabistro.com. I filtered out jobs that:
- Called for experience in television production (especially those that required years of on-air experience)
- Called for extensive experience as a field journalist (although I retained jobs open to those without journalistic experience; a few jobs were looking for bloggers or content contributers)
- Required degrees in finance or accounting
- Required extensive experience with Google Ads and/or other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) softwares (Salesforce was particularly popular)
- Required applicants bring a client log with them
- Required management or hiring experience (the term management is quite slippery in adverts; sometimes it means “manage a team” and clearly indicates the need for leadership experience. Sometimes it means “manage our twitter account” and isn’t, per se, a leadership position)
- Required backend coding skills
- Required extensive graphic design portfolios (I did retain entry level graphic design jobs)
- Required 5 or more years of experience
- Telemarketing jobs, part-time jobs, or unpaid internships
After filtering out these jobs, I was left with a corpus of 375 jobs.
Over the next two weeks, you will select and code a total of 20 jobs from this corpus. I have selected 10 advertisements for us to code together; you will each select 10 other advertisements to create your own 20 ad corpus. We will use a modified version of Brumberger and Lauer’s coding scheme that I will share in class on Friday.
Homework
I would like you to go through the 375 jobs listed above and find 10 to which you would want to apply. Download copies of them and put them in a folder.
If you do not already have a gmail account suitable for job searching, then create a gmail account suitable for job searching.
Read: Carolyn Miller, “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Communication”
Miller’s essay, published in 1979, speaks to the ways in which writing (and not just technical writing) gets intellectually devalued. Underwriting this devaluing is a positivist epistemology (epistemology is the study of knowledge). In a positivist epistemology, humans can, through various systems, arrive at objective, transcendent Truth. This can be a scientific truth (the earth is round) or a humanistic one (the meaning of Romeo and Juliet). Writing courses aren’t epistemic, they merely provide you with the skills to communicate the truths you discover using other epistemic methods/disciplines.
In your reading response, I’d like you to do two things. First, try and summarize how Miller counters this argument. What is her argument against positivism? What does it require we do/think differently?
Second, think about your own experiences as a student at UNC. To what extent does your education reflect the positivist tradition? Particularly with writing? Is writing framed in a positivist manner as objective and impersonal? Do texts have one single correct meaning? A range of meanings? Is the meaning of a text completely open to a reader?
