Chapter . Case 1: Using the Measures of Excellence in Evaluating a Résumé

It is the first day of the semester, and the instructor in your technical-communication class, Robin Shaftsbury, has asked for your assistance. Prof. Shaftsbury is planning to invite five guest speakers to the classroom during the semester to discuss topics such as the role of graphics in business documents, ethics in the workplace, writing effective proposals, and delivering oral presentations.

“What I’d like your help with,” Prof. Shaftsbury says to you after class, “is the presentation on job-application materials. The speaker is Matt Ito, the Director of the Career Center.”

“How can I help?” you ask.

“I know that Matt has a standard presentation that he delivers in classes about the process of preparing job-application materials, strategies for looking for work, and so forth. But I spoke with him on the phone last week and asked him if he wouldn’t mind tailoring the presentation to our course. He said he’d be happy to. So I’d like you to meet with him and help him see what we’re doing in Chapter 1 of our text. Can you figure out some way he can key his remarks to the ‘Measures of Excellence’ section of the chapter?”

“How long do you want his presentation to be?” you ask.

“He said he could do 20 minutes, focusing on résumés, but if you’ve got ideas for some kind of class activity after he leaves to fill out the 50 minutes, that’s fine.”

You tell Prof. Shaftsbury that you’ll get right on it. Later that day, you realize that if you created a form for evaluating résumés, based on the measures of excellence, you could show that to Mr. Ito before his presentation so that he could discuss it in some detail. Then, if you had a representative résumé, you could develop a class activity around it. You email Prof. Shaftsbury, who sends you a job ad (Document 1.1) and a student’s résumé sent in response to that ad (Document 1.2).

Download the documents below, and then begin your assignment.

Download a copy of Document 1.1. Download a copy of Document 1.2.

Your Assignment

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the case background and documents, complete the assignment below. Your instructor will tell you how he or she would like you to submit your work.

1. Using a word processor, create a form, based on the measures of excellence discussed in Chapter 1, that you can give to Mr. Ito to discuss and then to class members to use in evaluating the résumé. Be sure the form is itself a model of effective technical communication and that it prompts students to evaluate the résumé according to each of the measures of excellence, that it gives class members space to write comments, and that it enables students to use a numerical score to measure the effectiveness of the résumé.

2. Using this form, evaluate the résumé.

Reflecting on Your Work

Once you’ve completed your assignment, write a reflection about your work using the prompt below.

Question