WRTG 293 students,
Your last writing
assignment will be a report on a professional
organization in your field.
In
this assignment, you will conduct research on your field of study in order to
become more aware of the professional contacts, organizations, employment
opportunities, and trends in the field.
Steps
to Take in Completing this Assignment
· Locate
at least one professional organization in the field or profession that you plan
to pursue. One way to locate an organization of this nature is to conduct an
advanced search on Google. For example, the following screen capture shows a
student searching for professional organizations in cybersecurity.
Please note that a professional organization is a
voluntary. member-based organization. A training workshop offered by a company
is not a professional organization event. For example, if Cisco offers training
workshops and identifies the training workshop as a conference, that
event is actually not a conference offered through a professional organization.
It is a conference offered through a private company.
· Find
out what annual or regularly scheduled conferences the organization
coordinates. For example, in the field of cybersecurity, the IEEE Computer
Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy sponsors the following
conference:
·
Complete
a report on your findings. Your report will feature the following headings
o Professional
Organization
o
Description of Conference
o
Personal Applications
Information Under Each Heading:
Professional
Organization
After
you have located an organization related to your field of study, peruse that
organization’s website. Browse the details on that organization. You might
indicate when it started, how large it is, who is eligible to join, and what
its mission statement is, for example. Usually the major organizations will
have websites with this information.
Remember
that if you are copying any information, such as the mission statement, you
must document it with internal and end documentation using APA format.
Description
of Conference
Research one of the conferences held by the
organization. Some organizations will have one large conference annually (such
as the Children’s Literature Association), some will have two or more large
ones based on membership interests (such as the National Conference of Teachers
of English with its annual conference that focuses on elementary through
secondary education and its College Composition and Communication Conference
that attracts many thousands of college writing teachers). Some organizations
may instead offer several regional conferences; the Association of Business
Communication, for instance, tends to hold several smaller regional conferences
in different parts of the United States each year, with its one major conference
being held in a different country each year. Try to determine what the most
important conference is for your particular interests. The organization website
will almost certainly provide this information.
Provide
details about the organization’s conferences, including time, size, and
location. Then search for information from the organization’s latest
conference. If you cannot find this information, you may use information from a
conference from a previous year or, if necessary, information for the organization’s
upcoming conference.
Once you have located a suitable
conference, perusethe topics that were or will be covered at
theconference
by looking at the Call for Papers or theReport on Presentations.
In this section, you will find a list of perhaps 20-30 topics on which the
organization is accepting papers for presentations or, for a conference that
has already taken place, topics on which participants presented. Select three
topics of interest to you.
In addition,examine the theme
or title of the conference.
From the information you have gathered on the
presentations and the overall theme or title, write a paragraph on what the
most important or
interesting topics are in your field right now. This information
will be based on what is covered at the conference.
The following are
some examples of this process:
· At
the most recent Children’s Literature Conference, the theme was digital texts,
so there were many presentations on graphic novels and children’s movies. Some
of the most important talks were on the ways that graphic novels include
complexity via the graphic elements and on the way that “comic book”
style texts are moving their way into the picture book field, with discussions
about how that affects the way children learn to interpret books.
· At
the most recent Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
Conference, TESOL 2017, the title was “TESOL 2.0: Engage, Enrich, Empower.” The
plenary speakers for the conference talked about topics such as the challenges
in a high-technology, non-traditional, 2.0 world amidst the reduction of
resources for teaching English in this environment and how education operates
in a world of “smart machines.” The TESOL organization and conference is
divided into many interest sections, including adult education, higher
education, elementary education, computer-assisted language learning (CALL),
and second language writing, among others. The conference website and program
offer insights on new trends in teaching pronunciation, in teaching writing,
and in teaching adults. A report on the TESOL Convention would include trends
in the teaching of pronunciation, trends in the teaching of writing to college
students for whom English is not a first language, trends in teaching ESL to
adults, or trends in another area.
The
goal for this section of your report is to help you become aware of the topics
that people are exploring at this time. These topics will impact your field of
study in upcoming years.
Personal
Applications
In
this last section, you will describe what you have learned about your field
from this exercise and how the information might help your job search or your
progress in your career.
Ideally,
the report on the professional organization will give you some good ideas about
professional development in your field.
Length of your paper:
Your report should
be 800-1200 words.
Due
Date:
Your instructor will notify you of the due date. You
will write a first draft, your instructor will comment on the first draft, and
you will submit a second draft using the comments as your guide.
