Today’s Plan:
- Job Ad Report
- Code Job Ads
- Homework
Job Ad Report
Our first major paper this semester is the Job Ad Report. Generally this report is 6-8 pages, single-spaced (including title page, table of contents, and potential appendix). It does not need a formal reference list.
Rhetorical situation: we have been hired by the UNCo Department of English to write a report that can be delivered to high school seniors, and their parents, discussing the current job market for English majors. The report will also be distributed to University Administrators and used to leverage funding for the Department. The report will be shared with faculty in the Department ahead of a round of curricular revisions.
So we have multiple audiences for this report:
- Client: English Department
- Primary Audience: High School Seniors
- Secondary Audiences: Parents (who may or may not be skeptical that English is a viable career field), Administrators (who may or may not be skeptical of investing more resources in English, particularly money on technology-driven classes/computer labs), Faculty (who may or may not still see the mission of English tied to the traditional Liberal Arts education)
Although the paper won’t be due for several weeks, I want to gloss over the report specs now. My hope is that this lends relevance to the work we are doing. For instance, the coding work we do today would contribute to the methodology section. Our reading of Brumberger and Lauer also contributes to the methodology section (in a longer grant application or research paper, B&L would be part of the Literature Review–but lit reviews are more of an academic genre convention and aren’t often included in public facing reports.
- Length: Generally this report is 6-8 pages singled-spaced (this includes a title page, a table of content, and properly sized charts/graphs)
- Front Loaded Introduction: Does the intro summarize all significant findings and include specific, actionable recommendations?
- Methodology: The methodology section needs to do a few things. First, how did I collect the job ads (I described this process in a blog post, condense my Brumberger and Lauer discussion)? Second, how did you select your 20 jobs from the job corpus? Third, from where did we draw our coding scheme? Fourth, what did we do to ensure that our data was reliable? Could I recreate this work based on this section?
- Presentation of Data: Does the section contain a table or graph of data?
Can you understand the table or graph, or is there some mystery meat?
Does the writer make clear what the table or graph says? - Discussion of Data: Does the writer highlight significant or unexpected elements of the data? Does the writer put the data in conversation with previous research (Brumberger and Lauer)? Does the writer make specific recommendations based on the data?
- Style and Grammar [commas, run-ons, fragments, tense shifts, agreement errors, etc]
Does the paper reflect our work on style (Williams and Bizup, Characters and Actions)? - Does this paper reflect expectations for business formatting?
- Title Page
- Page Numbers (should not include the title page)
- Also, this is a professional report, not an academic paper. We are not using APA or MLA format for citing sources. Instead, we will rely on AP style–which uses in-line citation.
Finally, you should draft and revise this paper in the same Google Doc. I will check the document history to see if it indicates that the paper was given a careful edit? (And/or, is the document relatively error free? Are there sentences in which grammatical errors lead to misunderstanding?)
Code Job Ads
Let’s take another crack at coding a set of job ads. We can then input codes into our spreadsheet.
Finally, you can go throw a few of the ten jobs on your list and input the codes already in those documents into the spreadsheet.
Homework
For Tuesday, read the Miller and complete the Canvas discussion post. For Thursday, read the Lauer and Brumberger and complete the Canvas discussion post.
