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How to Write the Career Guide

English 202: Intro to Professional Writing

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Understand Your Audience and Purpose

• You are writing to college-age students interested in the field of professional writing or another career.

• Imagine the Career Center has hired you to create this document.

• Adhere to UI style guidelines in the use of typography, color, and design elements.

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Your paper will need:• Beautifully designed, eye-catching title page

• Table of Contents page

• Introduction

• Body (broken into logical sections)

• Conclusion

• Works Cited or Bibliography

These are not separate pages, so use headings to identify each major section and headings/subheadings within each to organize information.

Review and apply one or more organizing patterns from the lecture on Arrangement from project 1 (I’ve reposted it on the project 2 page).

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Title Page: Poor Design Choices

Color choices and design elements convey meaning.

Clearly, these are not the best rhetorical design choices.

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Title Page: Improved Design Choices

These rhetorical design choices match the purpose of the Career Guide.

When designing your title page, be certain the design supports your purpose.

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Microsoft Word Title Page Tip• If you change the background color of the title

page (or any page) in Word, that background color will be in all pages.

• To avoid that problem, use a text box and stretch it the width and length of your cover page.

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Introduction• Start with a purpose statement that includes the

career option you chose.

Example: – This Career Guide presents information and employment

projections for those interested in pursuing a career in technical writing.

• Add a forecasting statement at the end of the purpose statement that names the sections that follow (these are the topic areas or focus of your investigation).

Example:– The sections that follow explain what technical writers do,

how much they earn……

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Table of Contents

• You may create the table of contents manually.

OR

• Use the automatic table of contents feature in Word.

• The table of contents needs to be balanced on the page.

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Body of the Guide• In the body of your guide, organize your research

findings on all topic areas by applying one or more strategies or patterns from the lecture on arrangement.

• Use headings within each of the major sections (introduction, various body sections, conclusion, and bibliography).

• Incorporate comparisons of data at the national, state, and one other state level.

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Graphics• The required comparisons should include graphically

representing this data by choosing the most appropriate format that conveys the significance of this data:– Pie chart– Bart chart (vertical or horizontal)– Line graph– Scatter plot– Data Map

• All graphics should be made by you.

• Graphics should be labeled (i.e. Figure 1 etc.), captioned, referred to in the text by the label, and text should be wrapped (see software tutorials for help with text wrapping).

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ConclusionConclude the white paper on a forward-looking note by directing readers to services offered by the UI Career Center.

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Works Cited or Bibliography• It’s important that you cite sources in your Career

Guide.

• Use any standard documentation style (see the Purdue OWL for help).

• The last page will be a Works Cited or Bibliography depending on the documentation style you use.

• The next few slides show an example of how to do an in-text citation with a corresponding entry in the bibliography or works cited page.

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Example: Endnote Citation Style

In this example, I’ll be quoting from this page in the Occupational Handbook, and I will need to grab this citation for my Works Cited page. And I need to use an in-text citation with quotes around text I take directly from this page.

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For my in-text citation, I will need toadd a superscript number after the quote.

The “annual median wage for technical writers was $70,240 in May 2015.”1

It’s okay to put the superscript at the end of a paragraph rather than after each quote, and if you quote from the same page in another paragraph, use the same superscript number.

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Now, I just need to grab the bibliography information and cut/paste into my Works Cited page.

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I will use the corresponding superscript number next to the bibliography information I’m cutting and pasting.

Works Cited

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2016-17 Edition, Technical Writers, on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/technical-writers.htm (visited September 30, 2016).

There is no need to repeat the bibliography information for a page you quote from more than once in your paper, but when you quote from another page, you would need to use the next sequential superscript number (in this case ”2”) and grab that page’s citation information for your Works Cited page.