How to Write the Career Guide

1. How to Write the Career Guide
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English 202:
Intro to Professional Writing

2. 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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3. 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
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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).

4. Title Page: Poor Design Choices
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Color choices and
design elements
convey meaning.
Clearly, these are not
the best rhetorical
design choices.

5. Title Page: Improved Design Choices
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These rhetorical
design choices match
the purpose of the
Career Guide.
When designing your
title page, be certain
the design supports
your purpose.

6. 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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7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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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11. Conclusion
Conclude the white paper on a forward-looking note by
directing readers to services offered by the UI Career
Center.
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12. 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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13. Example: Endnote Citation Style
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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.

14. For my in-text citation, I will need to
add a superscript number after the quote.
The “annual median wage for technical
writers was $70,240 in May 2015.”1
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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.

15. 15
Now, I just need to
grab the bibliography
information and
cut/paste into my
Works Cited page.

16. 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).
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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.