Writing Assignment #1 Report on Professional Organization and Conference

Writing Assignment #1 Report on Professional Organization and Conference

Summary of assignment

• Task: You will write a report on a professional organization in your field and a conference that the organization sponsors.

• Length: 600-900 words • Format: If you cite the conference or other sources, you should use APA format in

citing the information • Sources: You will cite sources in this paper if you refer to information you obtained

from other sources. There is no minimum or maximum number of sources for this paper. • Purpose: The information you glean from this assignment will help you become more

aware of professional contacts, trends in the field, and perhaps employment opportunities in the field.

Steps to Take in Completing this Assignment

1. 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. You want to find a conference sponsored by a professional organization.

1. 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 an annual conference. Its conference for 2019 will be held in Stockholm, Sweden:
2. Write your report, highlighting your findings. Your report will feature the following sections with these headings:

o Professional Organization (approximately 100-200 words) o Description of Conference (approximately 300-500 words) o Personal Applications (approximately 100-200 words)

Information under Each Heading: Professional Organization

After you have located a conference in your field, explore the website of the organization that sponsors the conference.

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.

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

1. Peruse the conference website for the organization’s most recent conference or its upcoming conference.

Some organizations will have one large conference annually (such as the Children’s Literature Association), and some will have two or more large ones based on membership interests (such as the National Conference of Teachers of English).

Some organizations may instead offer several regional conferences. The Association of Business Communication (ABC), for instance, tends to hold several smaller regional conferences in different parts of the United States each year, and it holds one major international conference each year as well.

1. Peruse the topics that were or will be covered at the conference by looking at the Call for Papers or the Report on Presentations. In this section, you will find a list of perhaps 20- 30 topics on which the organization is accepting papers for presentations. You might have found a conference that has already taken place. In this case, you would find topics on which participants presented at the conference. Select three topics of interest to you.

In addition, examine the theme or title of the conference, if there is one.

1. 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 2019 Association for Business Communication Conference, the theme will be “Innovations with Business Communication: Companies, Communities, and Classrooms” (see https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/2019-annual).

o Various tracks for the conference are provided at the conference website, including consulting and training, organizational communication, employment issues in business communication, and visual communication.

• At the 2019 Children’s Literature Conference, the theme will be “Activism and Empathy” ( see https://chla.memberclicks.net/2019).

o The conference website provides a list of questions that presentations can address, including issues of political, social, and environmental struggles, literary genres and global awareness, and the role of children’s literature in the historical and political spectrum.

• For the 2019 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Conference, TESOL 2019, the conference does not have a specific title (see https://www.tesol.org/convention-2019).

o The plenary speakers for the conference will talk about topics such as endangered languages, the power of language, etc. The TESOL organization and conference is divided into many session strands, including applied linguistics, advocacy and social justice, and content and language-integrated approaches to teaching.

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. For this reason, understanding the trends and topics in your field will help you become more familiar with your field and will assist you in upcoming job searches as you pursue your career.

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 600-900 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.

Template for this Assignment: For this assignment, you may use the template on the following page. You would insert your information into the appropriate places in the template.

Name Class Date

(page break) Professional Organization [insert your information here] Description of Conference [insert your information here] Personal Application [insert your information here] (page break)

References