The Writing of Business The Employment Unit

The employment unit arrives, for most upper-level undergraduates, at a propitiously teachable moment. Response to the unit is usually enthusiastically positive. And, as structured in the following sample, the unit provides multiple occasions for letter writing. In fact, we often build the bulk of the course's letter writing assignments into the employment unit. There are multiple possibilities for letters of inquiry, follow-up letters, thank-you letters, and the like-to potential employers, interviewees, classroom visitors, references, and others.

We have found the following features of the unit to be especially helpful:

1. The exercises from Chapter 7 in self analysis and values clarification provide a good groundwork for discussing learning styles, communication styles, work habits, and teamwork in general; such discussion also assists in developing and maintaining the work groups for the group projects that generally follow the employment unit but which may run concurrently with the employment unit if the term is short.

2. The recycling and modifying of resumes-and especially letters-for different prospective employers helps clinch one of our most important points-that professional writing is richly rhetorical and is grounded in specific situations and specific audiences. Notice, by the way, that each iteration of the resume and letter assignments asks for a memo to the instructor incorporating a rhetorical analysis of the situation and the writer's document using the GRACE heuristic.

3. All the related activities-informational interviews, discussions with career services staff, reports to the class, and the like-are designed to help students generate as rich a context as possible for the employment documents they write and to demonstrate the fact that the written texts of the employment process, both those which they write and those (such as published ads) which they read, are only one very small part of their career development and networking process and resources.

4. The work of the employment unit, especially the activities built into Chapter 7, is actually a substantial marketing project in its own right. In fact, the exercise resonates strongly with the exercises in marketing classes such as that of Professor David Rudd of Michigan Technological University, who has written that the strategic principles entailed in the two kinds of exercises are the same. (See, for example Lamb and Hair's 1993 edition of Principles of Marketing, published by South-Western, especially Joseph Hair's instructor's manual.)

For questions and suggestions, please e-mail us at kilbornj@stcloudstate.edu or rinkster@stcloudstate.edu.