In the final stage of your Project 1 pre-writing, you will create a memo that uses information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook as its only cited reference.
Your memo will discuss the benefits and challenges to obtaining a job in the career that you have selected. It will be exactly one page in length–including your memo header, content, and reference. Some of your paragraphs will be about benefits and others will be about challenges. It is your work to consider what information in the OOH addresses these two sides to entering your career.
You will need to spend time reading through the OOH entry for (or closest to) your career in order to understand the wealth of information presented in the OOH for you to use in this assignment.
To begin, create a new Google Doc in another web browser tab. Title the document, “Project 1, OOH Memo.” Type your memo header at the top as you have done on the previous assignments.
Next, open this link to the OOH in a new tab of your web browser.
On the OOH site, look at the left column, “Occupational Groups.” Find the group that describes your career. For example, “Technical Writers” is in the group, “Media and Communication.”
Then, click on the job listed in your group that either is the name of your future job or most closely describes your future job.
If you have trouble finding your job, you can also check the OOH’s index here.
Once you’ve opened your job’s OOH page, copy-and-paste the URL from your browser into the Google Doc that you created earlier. You will need this for your reference at the bottom of your memo later.
Returning to the OOH page for your job, notice that there are section tabs at the top of the page: Summary, What They Do, Work Environment, etc. You will want to read through each of these tabs to learn more about your future job while keeping in mind that you want to identify the greatest/most interesting benefits and the greatest/most interesting challenges.
Anything that you quote or paraphrase from the OOH in your memo must be cited using a parenthetical citation like this: (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015, Section Name, para. number). For example, if I quote something from the third paragraph of the Job Outlook section of the Technical Writers entry, I would end that sentence with this parenthetical citation: (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015, Job Outlook, para. 3). I found the year of its publication at the bottom of the OOH entry’s page. For more info on this format, refer to the “Sources without Page Numbers” entry on this page.
After you have written the content of your memo, add your reference for the OOH entry that you used. It should follow the format of an online, government source. Look at the bottom of your OOH entry for the year that it was published/updated. For example:
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. (2015). Actuaries. Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2016-17 Edition. Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/actuaries.htm
Remember, the target for this assignment is one page–no more, no less. You should chunk your benefits and challenges into separate paragraphs, and your memo should lead with a brief introductory paragraph describing the document that you are creating.
Use all of class time to work on this assignment and be prepared to submit a draft one week from today during that day’s class.
