WRTG 293 students, Your third 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, 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 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.