ENG 301: 4.R Job Ad Report

Today’s Plan:

• What Can the ABO Book Internet Tell Us About Reports?
• Let’s Talk about this Report
• Making a Graph
• Brainstorming a Discussion Section
• Homework

What Can the Internet Tell Us About Reports?

I expect that, for many of you, this could be your first exposure to professional, rather than academic, writing. So let’s do some Google searches to see what we can learn about professional writing and the report genre.

Let’s look at different kinds of reports:

• Feasibility Reports
• Recommendation Report (sometimes called Investigative Reports)
• Formal vs Informal Reports
• Tables and Graphs in a business report (presenting data

Let’s look at these strategically, thinking through the canons of rhetoric: invention (ideas, content), arrangement (order of material, outline), and style & delivery (what do these things look like? how are they formatted?).

Here’s a space to put your findings.

Job Ad Report Expectations

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)

Let’s Talk About What *This* Report Should Look Like

• 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 [descriptive paragraphs after graphs]? Generally, these reports have three graphs–one on Tools and Tech, one on Professional Competencies, and one on Personal Characteristics
• 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 2015; Lauer and Brumberger 2019)? 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? (Check the ABO book)
  • 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, reference 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?)

Making a Graph

Assuming there’s time, let’s quickly go over making a graph in Google Sheets.

Let’s use this as a template.

Brainstorming a Discussion Section

Let’s head back to our collaborative Google Doc.

Homework

For next Tuesday’s class, I will ask you to read Jim Corder’s essay “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love” and complete the Canvas assignment. We will discuss Corder in class on Tuesday. For homework Tuesday night I will ask you to work on your report–to have something of a rough draft pieced together. The finished copy of the paper will be due Thursday, September 29th before class. We will start Project 2 that Thursday.

If you haven’t yet bought one of the three books from the syllabus (grant writing, visual design, social media), then please do so this weekend.