Seeking a Job on Social Media

This resource is titled Job Seeking on Social Media: Using LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to Find Your Dream Job by Noe Spies. This book looks into all of the ways that should set up your social media page allow interviewers and jobs  to see the best version of you. This could come in the form of how you post, how you set up your page’s structure, and so on. This coaching allows for people to be able to feel confident in what they post, and not fear of how their presence on social media looks to potential jobs. I think that this is very important for English majors because it allows them to know the dos and don’ts of social media when you are using it for a job or career position. With social media being such a large part of the world today, especially in terms of how you get a job, this serves as a vital tool to all English majors. For example, one sections of this article, titled “Be Visible, Active, and Involved,” seeks to inform people of how to keep their accounts active and appropriate for potential bosses. (Spies, p.1) This art of the book is very important, because it allows readers to understand how you should post on your social media that is appropriate for the work place. This book leads to help introduce people into the different aspects that they must look at when applying for a job, and how their social media should reflect the best parts of themselves. This book’s main takeaway is the very invaluable information that it offers an English major. It allows for them to grasp the different ways that their social media can influence the people that they will be sending their applications too. It offers other tips, such as the one about networking. In the book, it states, “Once you have crated your small network, you have to maintain it! Talk to people and offer your opinion where relevant.” (Spies, p. 2) This part of the book teaches you how to manage your circle of friends, and ensure that you know how to spread the amount of people that you know. In closing, this book allows for many different types of tips and information, tips that will be very important to students who are up and coming on graduation.

Works Cited

50minutes.com. Job Seeking on Social Media: Using LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to Find      Your Dream Job. 50 Minutes, 2015. Web.

Open Source Shakespeare

Open Source Shakespeare is a digital, web-based resource that could seemingly be utilized in unquantifiable ways—and yet it maintains some clear—and often explicitly disclosed—shortcomings. Developed by a graduate student from George Mason University, the OSS is not necessarily an especially “scholarly” resource, however, scholars may indeed find crucial utilitarian value in its capabilities. And yet, OSS is merely a website curating William Shakespeare’s complete works, which feature a number of sophisticated search engines that use a variety of linguistic algorithms to analyze the texts. And yet, that makes apparent another characteristic of this resource to scrutinize: the particular text of Shakespeare’s complete works utilized by this website is the Moby Shakespeare. As its developer, Eric M. Johnson, describes in a paper available from the OSS titled “Open Source Shakespeare: An Experiment of Literary Technology”: “The collection is an electronic reproduction of another set of texts which the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia identifies the source as the Globe Shakespeare, a mid-nineteenth-century popular edition of the Cambridge Shakespeare” (Johnson).

Whatever its limitations, OSS has many obvious uses. Although it uses a particular text—rather than daring to incorporate the many hundreds of existing critical editions of the preeminent and arcane Shakespearean quarto and folios—scholars, thespians, and casual readers may use OSS in a variety of ways. They can utilize the phonetic search engines, to find both existing uses of any exact search term, as well as any instances of etymologically-related words appearing anywhere in the Shakespearean canon. The OSS also allows users to search through stage directions, and the personae dramatis of each play. It has no apparent advertising feature on any of its web pages, no does it divulge any institutional sponsorship. Interestingly, Johnson produced the website as an active Marine stationed in Kuwait in 2001, and mentions in his paper that the OSS maintains an annual budget of $110 dollars, for “webhosting” (Johnson).

Work Cited

Johnson, Eric, M. “Open Source Shakespeare: An Experiment of Literary Technology,” Open Source Shakespeare: Search Shakespeare’s Works, Read the Texts, http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/.

Thesaurus.com

Paula J. Rodriguez

Thesaurus.com is a website that not only provides synonyms to commonly used words but prompts to improve writing. The writing tool allows the writer to write or paste the document into “word swap” and useful synonyms are provided for words used too often throughout the document. Even though you might be able to simply use the thesaurus included in Microsoft Word there are other uses for Thesaurus.com than simply finding synonyms for a document.

Thesaurus.com includes a word of the day along with writing prompts that assist in the use of the “word of the day”. For example, the word of the day on October 23^rd was erumpent and the theme for the word of the day in the week before Halloween seems to follow the holiday spirit with words such as macabre, ghoulish, and ghost word. One of the writing prompts is to see the definition of the word of the day and use it in a paragraph.

The writing prompts are not confined to the “word of the day” and include prompts on how to improve vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, and improvisation when writing any document. One of the articles that is shown daily is the importance of commas to make a sentence sound right. The writing article to improve writing on October 22^nd focused on empathy and how it influences writing. While the writing article on November 1^st focused on how to kill off a character when writing a story.

Thesaurus.com is published through Dictionary.com and has been available to the public for over 20 years. There is also an app for android and iOS devices for both Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com available for the public. This website connects to Lexico Spanish which is a site that shows a Spanish word of the day as well as tools to practice and study Spanish. This website is much more than just a thesaurus, it’s a tool for writers to improve and grow in their writing and for readers to strengthen vocabulary.

CreateSpace website

In the world of self-publishing, createspace.com is a website through amazon.com that does this very well.  This is an independent self-publishing website for writers who wish to publish their works online.  Of course, if a writer wishes to join, they have to sign up, but they don’t have to pay any money as far as what is seen on the website.  Unless they publish something on the website, then, part of the proceeds from the work published goes to the website.  Once signed up, a writer can either set up their book to be published or talk to a consultant.

Many features on the website include talking to publishers, looking at other people’s works, and looking at professional services like editing and marketing.  This gives the writer the opportunity to get a second opinion on their work before turning it in and to allow them to fix any mistakes in their manuscript.  This website provides convenient features like free publishing services as well as music and film services, which add to the website’s usefulness.  Createspace.com was originally started as a DVD on demand website in 2002.  Then, in 2007, the founders changed the name to fit the publishing needs of filmmakers, musicians, and writers.  For English majors, this is a good way for them to get their work noticed while they are still in school or while they are working a different job.

For writers in the past, editing had to be done with a publisher in person.  Today, with computers being as popular as they are, there are now new ways to publish a book, short story, or poem.  One of those ways is through self-publishing, online being a lot faster than having to send in a manuscript to a publisher and wait for a few weeks or months of waiting before receiving a reply or whether or not the author’s work was accepted.  Also, on the website, writers can read critiques that other people have posted about their works.  This gives the writer the opportunity to make some changes to their manuscript if they so desire.  It gives the writer the opportunity to perfect their craft without having to wait to hear from a publisher.

However, a writer must decide whether or not self-publishing is for them.  If not, they can go about getting their works published the old-fashioned way, which could take several weeks or months at a time.  With this website, getting published can happen very quickly.  Also, millions of people will be able to read a writer’s work by downloading the story onto their Kindle instead of having to buy a book.  Of course, some writers wish they could publish both through a website like createspace.com and through seeing a publisher face to face.  Nonetheless, for writers who don’t want to wait for many months for a publicist, this website is a good place to get started in the world of writing and self-publishing.