Daily Message for Nov. 1

Good Morning,

This week, you have two projects to focus on but ---- good news -- no new quizzes, readings, or exercises.


This week you need to:

1. Submit a revised draft of your enhanced resume for instructor review by Wednesday
2. Have a preliminary discussion with members of your group regarding Module 7 and settle on a set of instructions you'll use for your analysis.

Note: I've eliminated the mandatory peer review for Module 7. Because you're already working in groups on this project, you're already getting the benefits of many good heads. If your team wants to exchange drafts with another team, you can use the Module 7 Peer Review thread at any time during the run of the project.

I hope to have your Module 5 exams back to you by Wednesday. Grading these exams is much slower going than grading projects, but I'll get them back to you as quickly as I can.

About the Enhanced Resume Project

First, I noticed a number of people posted their resume drafts in the Peer Review space for Module 7. I believe most of you have already figured out that you posted in the wrong place. I'll go in tomorrow (Tuesday) and clear out any posts that are there, so make sure you post in the correct space for your individual peer group in module 6.

Second, I know some people are feeling really challenged by this assignment because they haven't taken the recommended pre-req classes or just don't have a resume they think is "any good." The good news is, you may be at an advantage on this assignment because you're more likely to think outside of the box of the traditional resume.

To do well on this assignment, it's important that you expand your thinking beyond the traditional English 407A/Business Writing resume. Your "enhanced resume" does not have to be -- and probably should not be -- seen as a resume that you actually send out. The title of this module is "Re-Envisioning Texts" because I want you to re-envision a document genre that everyone is fairly familiar with.  To do well on this, you'll need to move past manipulating text and adding more bullet points. Also, it's okay to have fun with this assignment.

As I mentioned on the discussion board over the weekend, you're not completely locked into Word as your design tool for this assignment. If you know how to use Publisher or Front Page or In Design or html and you want to use them, knock yourselves out. Just make sure I can open/read your final product.

Module 7: Group Analysis of Instructions

Module 7 is your one team-based assignment for this semester. You will remain in the same groups for this module as for Module 6. You’ll need to find a set of instructions fairly quickly so that you can perform your analyses and write up your findings.  As a collaborative project, you’ll need to divide up the work as efficiently as possible, so don’t hesitate.  Jump in and start talking.

There are literally thousands of instructions to analyze for strengths and weaknesses of document design.  Each person in the group should recommend one set of online instructions for the group to review and then you need to agree on the one you want to analyze.  If you don’t know of a set of online instructions off the top of your head, just google “how to” and you’ll find all that you want.

Once you’ve decided on a set of instructions, then you need to develop a strategy for creating your analysis document.  There are a variety of ways to do this, but the key is to define the sections for the document and be absolutely clear about who is responsible for what.  On the project page I've given you sections that should be in the report, but you can add sections if you believe that they would be helpful.  You might look at the samples on the Reading page for ideas about how to construct the report and what other sections might be appropriate. You might find it helpful to use Kostelnick and Robert's matrices to help guide your analysis/help you focus on the language/concepts from the textbook.

You can divide the sections of the analysis among group members or each person can do an analysis and write up a draft to share.  Then you can combine the drafts.  Just be sure to discuss how you plan to put the work together so that everyone in your group is clear about the process.

I’ll talk more about this over the next couple of days.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.

Hope everyone had a groovy Halloween. Have a great Monday!

Julie