To help students enter a professional discourse community, teachers must assess how accurately they both understand the community's discourse practices. Our research investigated how job recruiters seeking to fill positions in mechanical engineering or marketing were influenced by the quality of writing in student résumés. The résumés varied in elaboration, sentence style, mechanics, and amount of relevant work experience. The recruiters rated the résumés to indicate their willingness to interview the students. We found that recruiters in the two fields—engineering and marketing—valued quite different writing features. When we subsequently asked students in business writing and technical writing classes to rate the same résumés, we found that they underestimated the importance of various writing features. Generally, however, students' ratings resembled those of the recruiters in their respective disciplines. This study documents how students can improve their résumés and provides insight into the variations of discourse practices in professional disciplines.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College English. istorians of rhetoric need to return to the archives. In calling for this return, and for a tempering of our recent preoccupation with historiographic theory, I join other historians, including some of the Octolog II panelists at CCCC 1997 ("Octolog"). I am somewhat reluctant to push the point: I like theory and have learned a great deal from those in our field who have advanced it, I believe fully the truism that even historians who deny theory operate nonetheless from a theory, and I don't want to be labelled conservative.There are past traditions worth preserving-foremost among them many nineteenthand twentieth-century research methodologies. Most rhetoric and composition graduate programs require students to be conversant with histories of rhetoric and even theories about historical writing, but few require that students be expert at standard research methodologies. Literature students are often schooled in such methods, which has contributed to ever-richer histories. Of course, some graduate students in rhetoric also take those literary research methods courses, and are better for having taken them. But that training leaves out much that is necessary to the rhetorical projects our discipline most needs to undertake. I would argue that it is this neglect of methodological training that more than anything else prevents us from writing "better" histories of rhetoric. What we need is the kind of archival training graduate students in departments of history undergo, training tailored to recovering the history of rhetorical practice and instruction. Katherine Arens argues persuasively that requisite research skills vary according to the humanities discipline under study.Conceptions of archives predating Foucault differ very little from those held by contemporary historians, and the theories of early historians and philosophersincluding Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thomas Macaulay, and Thomas Arnold-Linda Ferreira-Buckley is Chair of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Texas at Austin. She has co-edited an edition of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters (Southern Illinois University Press 1999) and has written on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British rhetoric.
No abstract
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.