What Is This Document For?
Genre as social action, put to work on workplace writing. A revision workshop for résumés and cover letters, read the way a hiring reader reads them, then a report's skeleton borrowed from a one-page government summary, meeting minutes someone can act on, and an interview request that's easy to say yes to.
Process: Directed drafting1 round of revision
- When
- Professional writing · the job documents workshop and the report launch
- Length
- One long class, or two shorter ones
- Slides
- 17, each with its notes below it
Or press P. Arrow keys or a clicker move between slides, F goes full screen, and Esc comes back here.
This is one long evening in a professional writing course: a revision workshop on résumés and cover letters, the launch of a problem-solution report, a team’s first meeting minutes, and a request for an interview. One idea holds it together. Carolyn Miller argued in 1984 that a genre is defined by what people use it to get done, so the question to put to any document at work is what it’s supposed to make happen. Each half also runs alone as a shorter class: the first nine slides are the workshop, and the rest are the launch. One of the nine, the ten-minute cover letter, is for rooms outside a course, where nobody arrives with a draft.
Start here if the class has read Miller, and say out loud that the article is hard. It’s rhetorical theory from 1984, written for other scholars, and the excerpt I assign skips the densest middle on purpose (it’s pages 151, 155, and 163 to 165). One sentence each gets everyone’s guess on the table before hers. If the class hasn’t read Miller, the question still works: most answers will be about categories and formats, which is the view the next slide turns over.
Miller’s definition moves genre from the page to the situation. A situation keeps recurring: someone has to choose among strangers, or a team has to remember what it decided. People answer it in a way that becomes typical, and that typical answer is the genre. The format is what’s left behind by the action, which is why copying a template can still produce a document that doesn’t work.
Her examples are workplace documents on purpose, sitting in the same list as the eulogy and the sermon. Ask the room for a document they’ve had to write whose purpose nobody could explain. Somebody always has one, and it’s usually a form that outlived the situation it answered. The payoff comes on her last page: what we learn with a genre is “what ends we may have” (p. 165). Learn the cover letter and you learn that you’re allowed to recommend yourself to a stranger.
This is the hinge for the workshop. Miller’s fifth claim is that a genre is “a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence; it motivates by connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent” (p. 163). The candidate’s intention is private and singular: this job, for me. The employer’s need is public and recurrent: a role to fill, again, from a stack. A draft that only says what the writer wants hasn’t done the genre’s work yet. If you’ve hired anyone, this is the place to say what you looked for.
I skip this slide in class, where students arrive with a draft of their job documents and a classmate’s written response to it. It’s here for everyone else: a workshop at an organization, a faculty session, or a class that hasn’t drafted yet. Ten minutes gets a rough cover letter on the page, and the trade at the end gives each writer a reader’s response, so the next three slides work the same way for this room as for mine. A rough draft is better for this than a polished one. There’s more to see when it’s read for ten seconds, and less reluctance to cut.
Ten seconds is this talk’s stand-in for a first skim, not a measured figure: the point is that the first read is short, and it decides whether there’s a second. The page shows what was pasted for ten seconds and then turns it face down, so the partner has to answer from what stuck. Nothing pasted leaves the browser tab. Writers are usually surprised by what a reader can’t say back, and the gaps tend to be the same two: what job this is for, and where the proof was. Put one pair’s draft through it on the projector first, with the writer’s permission.
Two documents are open on every screen: the writer’s own job documents (the résumé and the cover letter they drafted) and the response a classmate wrote about that draft. The plan is a plan for the writer’s own draft. The response is what it’s built from, along with whatever the ten-second read turned up. In my course every major project gets a written peer response before the workshop, so the first five minutes are for reading it, and the next five for the plan. Three lines keeps the plan honest: one thing to keep, one to change, one to cut. Then one person’s draft goes on the screen, chosen ahead of time with the writer’s OK, and the class reads it as the person hiring: where does it say only what the writer wants, and where does it answer what the reader needs? Those are the cover letter slide’s private intention and public need, turned into something to look for. In a room that used the ten-minute cover letter, the draft is that letter and the response is the neighbor’s two lines.
The revision bench takes one writer’s draft through the four stations of “Revision: Seeing It Again”, and this slide reads each station for a job document. Have everyone paste the cover letter, a box to a paragraph. A résumé works too if each section goes in as its own paragraph. In “Say more,” the reader’s questions are the hiring reader’s: a claim like “detail-oriented” with nothing under it is the thin paragraph. Plan on 25 to 30 minutes at the bench. It ends with a picture of what changed, which makes a good exit ticket, and nothing pasted leaves the tab.
This is the turn from the workshop to the launch, and a good place for the break. The job documents were one writer answering one reader. The report is a writer answering someone who has the power to act on a problem, and the same test applies to it: after reading, what can that person do?
The Government Accountability Office puts a one-page “Highlights” in front of every report, and it’s the best short model I know for stating a problem, findings, and recommendations. This one is about the federal government’s internship and recent-graduate programs, so it asks at the national level what my class asks about its own school: how do students get into entry-level jobs? Look at the layout before the words. A reader who stops after the title still knows the ask. A bar chart shows hires falling (the page says by 64 percent since fiscal year 2013) before anyone reads a sentence. Ask what the recurring situation behind a GAO report is, and who keeps asking for one. The page answers under its own name: it’s “a report to congressional requesters,” and GAO “was asked to review federal internship programs.” Any Highlights page near your course’s subject will do; they’re all built this way, and as work of the federal government they’re free to copy and project.
Those three headings are the skeleton of the problem-solution report the class writes over the next few weeks, on evidence from a live interview and at least three outside sources. GAO’s three recommendations on this page are close to what a class could ask of its own institution: find out what’s driving the numbers, ask the people in the program, and share what works. The agency agreed to all three, which is worth pointing out: recommendations a reader can say yes to are specific about who does what. A fuller outline (problem, criteria, alternatives, recommendation) can wait for the next class.
The proposal comes before the report and is short (in my course, at least a thousand words). Everything in it grows from one sentence, so that sentence gets written in class, in the guided work time after the break, before anything else. Walk around and push the vague ones toward a specific reader and a specific gap. A sentence specific enough to be checked is one an interview can confirm or complicate, which is what makes it researchable.
In my course the class works all term as one committee on a single question, and this is its first meeting, so the class decides what its minutes should look like. Any team project will do. Hold off the format question with Miller’s cautionary tale. She studied the first five years of environmental impact statements: documents with strong similarities in form and substance, answering “a recurring rhetorical situation that was, in fact, defined by law” (p. 164). They still weren’t a genre, she concluded, because the scientific, legal, and administrative pieces never came together into one action. A required format and a required occasion weren’t enough. So before a team picks headings, it agrees on what the minutes are for.
Offer these four only if the class stalls; a format they argue their way to is one they’ll keep. Whatever they choose, test it against someone who missed the meeting: could that person act on these minutes tomorrow? Then write the first set together on the projector, and have a recorder post them where the whole class can find them. The ground rule matters most when the project is about real people nearby, as mine is. Minutes travel, and so does anything given to an AI tool.
The report is built on a live interview, so the request is a real document with a real reader, and it’s the same genre as the routine request the course opened with: easy to say yes to in two lines. Students name the person first, then draft. Put two on the projector if there’s time and ask the ten-second question of each: what is this person asking for, and what would you do next? The clock is the hard part. The interview has to happen before the report draft can, so the request goes out this week, not the night it’s due.
In an eight-week course this is the third meeting: the revision and the proposal draft come due at the end of the week, and the peer response early in the next. The page in the corner went through the whole evening too. It was pulled from the stack, read for ten seconds, revised, and somebody called. That’s the test for everything written from here on.
Readings
- Carolyn R. Miller, "Genre as Social Action," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151–167 (1984): pp. 151, 155, and 163–165
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, Federal Workforce: OPM Needs to Take Additional Actions to Improve the Federal Early Career Talent Pipeline, GAO-25-106658 (March 2025): the one-page Highlights
- For the next class: Joseph Bizup, "BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing," Rhetoric Review, 27(1), 72–86 (2008)