Progress report: Group Writing

Intro:
The document my group is assembling is an informative handbook.  The purpose of this handbook is to aid future students in creating an effective cover letter and resume. So far, my group and I have spent the last couple of weeks gathering ideas and working on a formal proposal for the project.

Facts and Discussion:
The amount of work that has actually been done so far is pretty small. What I mean is, the amount of actual progress toward a completed document. Right now, the group is still in the planning phase. Like I said, we are collaboratively working on our proposal. This has been effective in getting everyone on the same page as far as what we should expect of the document as a group and not individuals. The next phase is the core format of the document (handbook) itself. Our initial idea was to provide a useful tool for students, giving them practical advice through every step of the resume/cover letter writing process. To do this, we are taking advantage of the fact that everyone in our group is of a different major. Every one of us has a different rhetorical situation that is shaping what we write. We want to address each of these different contexts, but we have to do it in a systematic way. My main concern was that the document will seem too different between categories. Because of this, my goal is to work on a format for each section. There are critical points that are common to all majors when writing professional documents (or "when facing their rhetorical situation"). I want each section to address the same points, but from the different angles of the specific major. This will ensure continuity and symmetry in the writing.

Conclusions:
Apart from these things, I feel like we are well on our way to producing a worthy document. I keep reminding myself that planning and patience is more important than just throwing out a document that will later need to be greatly amended. I am fortunate enough to be a part of a group of individuals who are good communicators and good students. This eases a lot of my stress as well.

Recommendations:
The next big step after finishing the proposal is writing. While it may feel like there is a lot of time to get things done, I will recommend one thing: do a little every day. If we can write a couple of sentences each day towards our section of the booklet, it will only take about a week to get each section done. Then, the group can work on the important introduction and conclusion sections together. My main goal is for the writing to be done with a couple of weeks to spare. I want the last 2 weeks to be spent on the appearance of the document. Having the writing completed beforehand will ease much of the stress, and finding a middle ground in terms of design will be much easier. Also, I believe that we should arrange our work schedule in such a way that we have most of our writing completed before any of the "final exam" stress starts kicking in for those of us who have other classes.