Today’s Plan:
- Syllabus
- Ross 1240 Computer Lab
- Project One Overview
- Email Assignment
- Brumberger and Lauer Assignment
Syllabus Review
Yeah, sure, starting with the syllabus is cliche. But this course probably works a bit differently than others you’ve taken for a couple of reasons. First, because I use labor-based grading. Second, because this course is designed less as a vehicle to teach you something, and more as a vehicle for you to develop a skill.
Ross 1240 Computer Lab
Starting next week, we’ll be meeting every Thursday in the Ross 1240 computer lab. Tuesday’s we’ll continue to meet here in CAND 0240.
Brumberger and Lauer on Jobs
Our first project is rooted Eva Brumberger and Claire Lauer’s article “The Evolution of Technical Communication: An Analysis of Industry Job Postings.” I developed this project in conjunction with research I conducted as I was developing professional writing courses for UNC’s Writing minor. I was charged with developing 3 courses that would help both Writing minors and English majors be better prepared for the job market. This charge led me to research job advertisements for English majors, and Brumberger and Lauer (2015) 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 it (as do I) in the more precise sense of developing documentation (instruction manuals), product testing (usability reports), 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 relevant to a smaller department. 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 5 tenure-track faculty (and none of us, I think, would claim Professional or Technical writing as a core specialization–we have experts in Rhetorical Theory, Public Rhetorics, Cultural Rhetorics, Compositionists, etc). So the question that drove my own research, which you will learn to recreate, is: what skills, technologies, characteristics can UNC focus on to maximize your preparation for today’s job market?
In answering that question, I’ve turned my attention to Professional Writing jobs outside of technical writing. 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, I used mediabistro.com because it focuses specifically on jobs involving writing and communication.
I spent the month of June 2018 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 “code” 20 jobs from this corpus. We will talk about qualitative coding in class on Wednesday. In addition to familiarizing you with the job market, and the tech, skills, and characteristics for which employers seek, you will also learn a staple Professional writing/ qualitative research method: corpus coding (and a few methods that go with it, such as norming a coding scheme and ensuring the reliability and validity of data).
Here are the stages / parts of the Job Analysis Project (which we will be working on for approximately the next month).
Job Corpus. This is the collection of job ads (from June 2018) from which you will choose 20. Then you will code those job ads.
Job Coding Scheme. Here is a link to the coding scheme. I have slightly modified the scheme used by Brumberger and Lauer. After we read Brumberger and Lauer, I spend two classes coding ads a class (norming sessions). This familiarizes them with coding and qualitative research methods. When there is disagreement on a code, we take a class vote.
Collective Job Code Spreadsheet. Students highlight text in the google doc job ads and insert their codes as comments so that other students can review them. The more students that input codes, the better! This creates the data they need for their report. So, after students code a job ad (inserting comments in the Google Doc), they should insert a link to that document (from the corpus) into the spreadsheet (the job title) and put their codes into the spreadsheet too. (I know this sounds complicated, but I can probably show you this in 3 minutes).
Personal Research Data Spreadsheet. Students make their own, personal copy of that file. They then select the jobs from the spreadsheet that they want to use in their report and make another spreadsheet that they can use to produce graphs. I do this in Google Sheets, you could also probably do it in Excel (Sheets is just more convenient to share and easier, IMO, to use). If you need help turning tabular data into a graph, I can show you quickly (it literally just takes a right-click, then playing around with some menu features for labeling axis and formatting).
Job Report Rubric. Because professional writing is so different than academic writing, I spend a lot of time familiarizing y’all with the rubric. We do this by assessing papers as a class and comparing our evaluations. Below are some sample papers; we will use the rubric to score some sample reports before we finally draft, share, and revise the final reports. Trust me, you can do this.
So, that’s a lot of stuff–but like I said, that will comprise nearly the first month of class and I’ll be here to walk you through every step.
Let’s try coding a job advertisement or two.
Homework For Thursday / Tuesday
For your first assignment, I would like you to send me an introductory email following the formatting rules for email found in the Alred, Brusaw, and Oliu’s Handbook of Technical Writing (ABO). [Why ABO?]
When writing an email to a faculty member, it is helpful to consult this chart [especially if you don’t know how faculty rank works / you don’t know a lot about who is teaching your class].
DO NOT USE CANVAS TO SEND ME THIS EMAIL. I cannot reliably respond to emails sent via Canvas, nor can I include them in emails to our community partners. So, part of this exercise is asking you to send me an email from your preferred email address, one that you check regularly.
My email address is marc.santos@unco.edu.
Your email should do a few things:
- introduces yourself (and your academic/professional trajectory, major? minor? what year? future plans?)
- explains your interest in the course (what are you hoping to learn? why are you here?)
- details any professional or creative writing experience you have
- details any social media or graphic design experience you have (including software proficiencies). Personal social media experience counts, too
- asks me a question (about the class, about myself, about the job market, the writing minor, or about life, liberty, and/or the pursuit of happiness)
Also note the Brumberger and Lauer, “The Evolution of Technical Communication: An Analysis of Industry Job Postings” assignment in Canvas. The Canvas assignment has details on the reading response post (you can find the Brumberger and Lauer reading in the files section of Canvas). We will talk about the discussion posts in class on Thursday–the reading and discussion post are due next Tuesday.
