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.

What Can You Do with a Major in English?

The book titled What Can You Do with a Major in English? Real People, Real Jobs, Real Rewards by Shelley O’Hara works as a guide for English majors that helps them pursue a career once they graduate. It gives helpful information such as how to conduct a job search, and how to find the different salary levels that people must look. This article would be beneficial to English majors because it helps them with those big questions of “What am I going to do once I am done?” and “How am I ever going to find a job?” This book purpose helps ease student’s minds by showing them that they are going to be able to find work, no matter how hard it is going to be. It can also serve as a guide for resources that they might not be able to find on their own. 

Overall, this resource can benefit English majors in terms of what they need to do to find the job that they really strive for, and how they will be able to acquire that job. This resource is valuable to English majors because it touches on the important aspects that one will face when finding a job in this career. For example, the book discusses topics such as: “Breaking into the Job Market with an English Degree,” and “Career Possibilities for an English Major.” (O’Hara) These chapters both discuss the different things that an English major can do, while all of the previous chapters discuss how one chooses where to go to school, what makes them pick English, etc. Throughout these chapters, there are also many specific things that someone going into this career field can use. In one chapter, O’Hara writes, “You can find a wealth of job-related sites on the internet.” (O’Hara, p.57) With this part of the chapter, she is describing the different methods and websites that you can use on the internet to look for and apply to jobs. This can be very valuable, because most English majors may have not ever looked into the complexities of the job market before.

Works Cited

O’Hara, Shelley. What Can You Do with a Major in English? Cliffs Notes, 2005. Web.

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Poetry

Poetry Foundation is the website for the Poetry Magazine. The magazine publishing company is located in Chicago, Illinois run by the deputy director of administration,  Krystal Languell. The website makes it easier and faster to find more poems and information about a specific poetry related topic. It allows someone to get more information about Renaissance playwrights and authors as well as authors from other eras like Edgar Allan Poe, D.H. Lawrence, and Layli Long Soldier. Poetry Foundation includes poems, articles, and poets from different cultures and time periods. The websites even makes it easy for someone to find collections of a specific topic. Some of their collections include Poetry and Feminism, Native American Poetry, and Poems of Jewish Faith and Culture. 

The variety of poems include some for all ages. There’s a section where someone can find poems specifically for kids as well as teenagers. The website includes a section for audio poems. People can listen to some poems instead of reading them.  A part of the website is dedicated to learning. They have this section split up into different sections. There’s a section for children, teenagers, adults, educators, and even a glossary of poetry terms. The glossary has definitions of every poetry term which they have organized in alphabetical order. Some of the terms they have are abecedarian, Kenning, and Tanka. 

There’s even a place where someone can get information on how to submit their own work, so they can be featured in the magazine. In order to submit poems, it has to be original work. The website mentions they prefer the poems to be written in English or at least translated to English. They no longer accept paper submissions since July 2013. On this page, they list the steps that a person would need to follow to send their submission.

Works Cited

Languell Krystal. Poetry Foundation. Web Access 10/11/2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org

Renaissance Civilization

The Renaissance: The Story of Civilization V by Will Durant is about the civilization history of Italy from 1304 to 1576. Will Durant gained popularity with his History of Philosophy. The Renaissance: The Story of Civilization V is the fifth volume in his monumental seven-part series. The Renaissance: The Story of Civilization V was published in 1953 under by Simon and Schuster located in New York.  

The purpose of this book is to aim towards the philosophical history, studies the economic basis and background, and focuses on the growth and history of the Renaissance era and the effects it had on society. Durant explains how Renaissance was presented in multiple cities in Italy and among different types of people from princes, poets, historians, scientists, etc. An example is how the “waning of the Renaissance” was popular among historic figures like Titian, Aretino, Veronese, and Benvenuto Cellini. He explores the self-emancipation of man during the Renaissance and how they had no purpose except for their happiness. Durant explains how in Italy they explored ideas in order to advance as a society but then banished these ideas.

The book is organized by book and then chapters. Book I: Prelude covers years 1300-1377.  Chapter one is about The age of petrarch and Boccaccio (1304-1375). Under each chapter there are several subheadings like The Father of the Renaissance, The Poet, Siena, etc. Chapter two covers The Popes in Avignon (1309-1377). After chapter two, Book II picks up with chapter three, and it does this with three through five as well. The book does include pictures like Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Doors of the Baptistery located in Florence and Donatello’s David bronze statue in Florence.

Works Cited

Durant, Will. The Renaissance: The Story of Civilization V. Simon and Schuster, New York: 1953.

Writing Tutorial Services

Writing Tutorial Services is a resource provided by the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Overseen by John Paul Kanwit, director of the Campus Writing Program at IUB, the Writing Tutorial Service offers academic help to students both on and off campus. Located at the Wells Library Info Commons at the University, the WTS provides both graduate and undergraduate tutors to students, however, they do not accept walk-ins, every student must schedule an appointment through the Service’s website. While in person help is only available to those registered at the university, the WTS also provides a variety of infographics and writing guides that are free for the general public to use. Subjects include advice on writing thesis statements, personal statements and academic letter, and writing book reviews. For example, in the guide “How To Write A Thesis Statement”, a step by step process is laid out to guide readers through the process of writing a thesis statement with and without a predetermined topic, listing examples of weak versus strong statements such as “World hunger has many causes and effects” in contrast to “Hunger persists in Glandelinia because jobs are scarce and farming in the infertile soil is rarely profitable” (Writing Tutorial Service). Additionally, the website provides information on common grammatical errors and ways to avoid plagiarism. The site is fairly easy to navigate with links to tutorials being displayed on their main page.

Works Cited

“How To Write A Thesis Statement.” Writing Guides: Writing Tutorial Service, 2011, wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/pdf/how-to-write-a-thesis-statement.pdf.“

Writing Guides.” Writing Tutorial Services, wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/index.html

Online Books Page

The Online Books Page is  a website with an accumulation of over 3 million free books, put together by researcher and digital library planner John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania. Ockerbloom first created the OBP in 1993 while he was attending Carnegie Mellon before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. Partnering with organizations such as Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust, and the University of Florida in Baldwin’s Digital Collection of Historic Children’s Literature, the Online Books Page works to provide a large variety of books at no charge to the public. Examples of the books provided include a cookbook entitled The A & P Cook and Recipes Book by Edna Neil, published sometime in the beginning of the 20th century and the Daemonologie, a book about black magic and demons written by King James I in 1597. While it is possible to find any number of historical books, it is difficult to find modern resources due to their submission process. Before a book can be added to the OBP, it must meet a certain set of criteria. Submitted books must be “legitimately available at no charge, must contain the European alphabet, and must be a well formatted text in a standard format”( Online Books Page). Although it partners with multiple organizations,the OBP does not receive any external funding for any of its resources, technical services are provided through its residency at the University of Pennsylvania.

Works Cited

“The Online Books Page.” Edited by John Ockerbloom, The Online Books Page, 1999, onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/.

The Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

Along with seemingly containing the entire life’s work of the Irish-born wit, The Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde includes photos of the author and his family, and a chronology of his life. This particular edition is Collin’s fifth of this title, which was published in 2003. And incidentally, as the text notes on its back cover, Harper Collins has published iterations of Oscar Wilde’s complete works since 1948. Interestingly, this edition also contains introductions each by Vyvyan and Merlin Holland—who are, respectively, the son and grandson of Wilde. For scholars, these paternally-proximate preludes may proffer personal insights into the oeuvre of the anthologized author.

The Collins text also includes a partial Wilde bibliography, which features major works, like De Profundis and The Importance of Being Earnest, along with their initial publication dates, houses of publication, and the number of copies first printed—often with ancillary details concerning the context of publication. What’s more, this text includes a seemingly comprehensive bibliography of scholarly articles and books written about Wilde and his works, which might prove useful to scholars of literature, who are seeking secondary sources. Along with the works mentioned in this bibliography, like E.H. Mikhail’s Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, the Collins edition includes editorial descriptions. Intriguingly, this often includes qualifications on the validity of the sources included. For example, under the entry for Thomas A. Mikolyzk’s Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography, the Collins editors conclude that the source is “More comprehensive than Mikhail but packed with errors,” (1262).

This resource is available for students of English at Tennessee Tech, from the front desk of the Volpe Library, under “Two-Hour Course Reserves” whenever they take English 3820—a currently-required course for all English majors at this institution.

Work Cited

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Fifth Edition. Harper Collins, 2003.

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/.