eplough's blog

If you have ever been on the phone with a customer service representative, you are probably familiar with this kind of apology: “I do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Quite frankly, I am hesitant to assign group projects to students. I have bad memories from my undergrad days of doing entire group projects by myself, so I am skeptical of the ability of students to work together effectively and equally. The challenges of teamwork are only exacerbated by our distance ed course, where group members may never meet face to face. But group work is a reality of the professional workplace, and you will need to be able to work productively in teams to accomplish complex tasks quickly.

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?

Resumes are one of the more perplexing documents you'll ever have to compose. You will spend a lot of time thinking about what needs to go into it, then you will spend a lot of time composing the resume, and THEN you will spend a lot of time revising and fine tuning it. However, your audience (the HR person who will be reading your resume) will spend 10-30 seconds reading it! All that work for 10-30 seconds. How frustrating.

This is the resume extravaganza activity. Open the file below, and read through all the resumes in no more than 8 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 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?

Getting a job is not an exact science, so concrete thinking will only take you so far. In order to land a good job these days, you've got to approach the task with a considerable amount of abstract thinking. There are so many factors to consider that listing them all would not only be tedious but also impossible. I will go through a few of the major ones, however, and the first major project in this course, the Employment Project, will help you figure out how to navigate the treacherous waters of job application, so get ready to work hard.

Welcome to English 420Y: Business Writing Online! This is the first of several Instructor Blogs that I will be writing over the course of the summer. They should be both informative and helpful as we navigate our way through the various lessons. They will also clear up concerns regarding expectations and grading. Before we can dig in, some definitions of terms we will be using this summer will help us all be on the same page.