The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre:
The Resume in American Business
Discourse Textbooks, 1914-1939
RANDALL POPKEN
Before me, a stack of sixty resumes, each a sterile, word-processed summary
of someone's life. Not a smudge or a finger print in the lot. ...
I want to hire a human being, a living person who can handle the job, one who
will latch on to a problem with verve. Judging from these resumes, I'm
presented with a row of automatons .... No life here-just dry compilations
of administrivia.
Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil
Introduction
In the last few years, several scholars have been exploring some intriguing
questions aboutthe origins and evolution of rhetorical genres l : Where do genres
come from? What is the curve of a genre's development? What affects the
evolution of a genre? Several scholars including Charles Bazerman ("Systems
of Genres") and David Russell ("Rethinking Genre") have recently explored
these issues. However, the most ambitious investigation into genre origins and
development appears in research on the genre of the memorandum by Joanne
Yates and Wanda Orlikowski.
Yates and Orlikowski's work relies heavily on a Malinowskian model ofthe
relationship between text and context; i.e., a genre is related ecologically to its
rhetorical situation. The memorandum grew out of American corporate culture:
it was "a practical response to the demands of growing companies that were
systematizing their management in early twentieth century American corporations" (Yates, Control through Communication 65). Further, this relationship
between genre and context is complex and multi-dimensional. Drawing on
influences from Anthony Giddens' structuration theory, Yates and Orlikowski
show how the memorandum was not only shaped by rhetorical context but, at
the same time, was the shaper of future communicative responses (305). In short,
genres are "social institutions that are produced, reproduced, or modified"
(Yates and Orlikowski 305) in the native environment of their use.
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Thus, in the perspective taken by Yates and Orlikowski, the factors affecting
the evolution of the memo are entirely contained within the context of corporate
culture. At first-before the Civil War-the letter was the genre of preference
in American businesses, where the common need was for communication with
"external individuals orfirms" (Yates and Orlikowski 311). However, from 1870
to 1920, because of the growth of middle management in American corporations,
achange took place (Yates and Orlikowski 313). Now, "to improve efficiency
and regain control from the workers and foremen," management had to create
a new genre, one in particular that would be "stored for later consultation and
analysis" (Yates and Orlikowski 313). The result was the memo, which ultimately
took on its own rhetorical functions and formal features. The birth of the new
genre was complete by 1920 when the term "memorandum" began to be used;
the term "reinforces the central social nature of the emergent genre" (Yates and
Orlikowski316).
But, despite the enormous amount that their scholarship contributes to our
understanding of the genre/rhetorical context relationship, Yates and Orlikowski
do not venture into discussions of other (external) influences-coming from
other rhetorical contexts-that might also have arole in the origin and ultimate
evolution of the genre they investigate. For instance, their work brushes off
possible influences on the memorandum from former students who first learned
to write it in educational settings; that is, the claim is that pedagogy "lagged far
behind practice" when it came to the origins and evolution of the memorandum
in business writing (yates, Control Through Communication 65). In contrast to what
Yates and Orlikowski find regarding the origins and evolution of internal
communication genres in business, I want to suggest that mass pedagogyparticularly the textbook-might also playa role in the origin and subsequent
development of a genre. To illustrate this point, my discussion centers on a genre
that has risen to prominence in twentieth century professional job search
contexts across the U.S.: the resume. 1
Despite being so widely used, the resume has yet to be discussed much in
non-prescriptive, evaluative, scholarly forums (Moran and Moran 336). One
exception, though, is a recent discussion by Lester Faigley, who criticizes the
severe limitations that rhetorical properties of the resume place on resume
writers. For example, Faigley argues that, in modern job searches, the resume
forces employment candidates to locate themselves entirely "within the discourse of the institution" (142)-that is, the world of the professions. Situating
the self in such a way is curious, though, since the resume is normally created
outside of institutions, and it is fundamentally an autobiographical genre (Conklin),
one in which candidates are asked to construct a self. Faigley's sharpest criticism
of the modern resume is how it forces candidates in the process of this selfconstruction to regard themselves as products to be sold, as commodities that
they must market to the highest bidder (142).3 F aigley then goes on to identify
some formal properties of the resume that inhibit the selves that writers are able
to construct. For instance, he uses the example of the subjectIess sentence, a
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 93
syntactic convention that appears in few other genres (e.g., instead of "I
performed and supervised technical training of personnel," the resume version
is "Performed and supervised technical training of personnel"). As Faigley
argues, the very fact that resume writers eliminate reference to themselves by not
using first person point of view in effect effaces their own subjectivity (141).
But besides what Faigley discusses, there are a good many other properties
and contextual circumstances that further limit the ways one can construct self
in a resume. For instance, the superstructure expected in resumes is relentlessly
invariable: the self can only fit into categories such as career objectives; work
experience; oreducation (popken and Conklin 138). Furthermore, there are severe
spatial limitations: a candidate generally has one and at the maximum two pages
of subjectless sentences and phrases in which to show who he or she is.
Furthermore, the modern resume also has some topical prohibitions: that is,
acceptable topics include the candidate's previous positions, the candidate's
educational attainment, and an indication of how rapidly he or she has climbed
the corporate ladder. Forbidden topics include almost anything about the
candidate's home life, non-work interests, or philosophy of life (Popken and
Conklin 135). In short, to borrow a term used recently by Gordon Harvey in an
article about the genre of the essay, the resume has few properties that permit
writers to reveal "presence" (650)-a sense of an individual human being who
produced the document. No doubt making these restrictions even worse is the
incredible pressure to conform to the norms preached by resume "experts":
personnel professionals who publish articles and books on how to write a
resume, scholars whose work consists of surveys of such experts, and professional resume writers who take information from their clients and fit it into
prepackaged resume formats. 4 After all, job candidates are warned, without the
"right" resume, a job search is doomed. Who dares to challenge such authority
when economic well-being is at stake?
This idea that prohibitions are built into discourse is axiomatic for many
modern theorists (e.g., see Bazerman, "The Life of Genre" 23). Foucault,
however, focuses more on discursive malignity in what he calls "rules of
exclusion," which are used to control the production of and the access to
discourse (216). While some of these exclusions exist in the culture producing
the discourse, others become internalized in the discourse itself. From the
perspective of genre, the point is that rules of exclusion-or, as I will call them,
"exclusionary features"-exist within the very fabric of the genre. These
features may be present in a genre from its earliest development, though as it
evolves a genre might rid itself of some of them and obtain others. However,
the older and the more fossilized its conventions become-especially if there are
large numbers of users who are unwilling to challenge the genre-it is less and
less likely that the genre will change.
In Faigley's judgment, exclusionary features in the resume have been
supported and perpetuated by contemporary business discourse textbooks
because of the range of their influence and because they tend to be uncritical in
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how they depictthe genre (139-140). It seems to me that, while Faigley is certainly
right about these books, we can understand a good deal more about the resume
if we can go back much further to investigate how andwhy theseexclusionaryprinciples
becameembeddedintheresumeinthejirstplace. Mythesisisthatagoodmanyofthese
principles can be traced to an unusual (and unfortunate) set of circumstances
surrounding the way the resume was first displayed and promoted early in the
twentieth century in business discourse textbooks. To argue this thesis, I
examine in this paper: (1) the unique way that historically the resume as genre
has been disseminated to its users; (2) the extent of resume knowledge by
instructors and textbook authors in early business discourse courses; and (3) the
particular ways that the resume was first displayed and promoted in business
discourse textbooks between 1914 and 1939.
Genre Dissemination and the Special Case of the Resume.
Genres ordinarily do not spring into being fully developed. Instead, they
sometimes emerge from out of an existing "host" genre (Dubrow 116), orthey
sometimes result from several genres interacting at once (Kress 41). More
important than the origin of a genre, though, is how it becomes distributed to
its users-its dissemination. In fact, no genre can grow and develop without
somehow being disseminated through a community of users or potential users.
In the early stages of a genre's existence, especially if it has not been disseminated
widely or quickly, users of a genre are often confused over what its properties
(formal or non-formal) are (Yates and Orlikowski 317). However, the process
of dissemination to users normally helps to reduce such confusion, stabilizing
a genre. Fundamental to the dissemination of a genre is its self-perpetuation:
When individuals draw on the rules of certain genres ... they also reproduce these genres
overtime .... For example, when organizational members write business letters ... , they
implicitly or explicitly draw on the genre rules ofthe business letter ... to generate the
substance and form of their documents or interactions. They also, in effect, reinforce
and sustain the legitimacy of those rules through their actions. (Yates and Orlikowski
302).
And, deeper yet at the heart of the dissemination process is the role of modelling,
as Terry Threadgold 0 bserves:
Each time a text is produced so as to realize and construct a situation-type it becomes
the model for another text and another situation-type. As a model, it functions like a
static, finished product or a system according to which new texts can be constructed.
(108-109)
In technical or business world contexts-for instance in the kinds of situations
Yates and Orlikowski studied-a genre is usually disseminated when participants read example after example of the genre in the course oftheir daily work
activities. Of course, many of these participants then go on to produce their own
renditions ofthe genre, imitating (consciously or unconsciously) the ones they
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 95
have already read. In one study of writing in a non-academic context, an engineer
consciously imitates past reports as models for new ones he is working on (Selzer
181). This imitation process, repeated over time, normally helps to establish
what a genre is like.
By contrast, throughout most of its history, the resume has had to rely on
a different pattern of dissemination and stabilization for most of its users.
Though today a job candidate's resume might appear on a home page for the
entire Internet world to eavesdrop on, until recently the resume was never
directly accessible to most people who used it. That is, the only people who had
access to actual resumes-ones written for real job application contexts-were
members of the small community of hiring professionals whose job it is to read
resumes to make em ployment decisions. And so, unless friends or colleagues
asked us to critique their resumes, or unless we were lucky enough to know a
personnel director who was willing to let us look into application files, most of
us never got to see the real thing. Instead, historically the resume was in the
unusual situation of having to be disseminated to most users through the kinds
of popular accounts I referred to in the previous section of this paper: popular
magazines, newspapers, self-help manuals, and resume writing services. These
accounts vigorously promoted (and continue to promote) models of a genre that
I will refer to as the "official resume." Unfortunately, these models are often
idealized, ones written by experts to suit hypothetical employment circumstances. Even when published resumes are ones written for real job application
situations, they have generally been hand picked or homogenized somehow by
professional editors.
However, if we go back before the early 1940s, resume writers didn't have
such popular media articles to rely on for models. 5 In fact, such articles don't
show up with much regularity until the middle 1960s, and the term "resume" (or
any other term used to refer to the genre) has no entry in the Reader's Guide to
Periodical Literature until 1972. A number of self-help job search manuals were
on the market by the 1930s (e.g., Edlund; Gardner; Lyons and Martin), but the
focus of these books is most often on locating jobs and on developing effective
interview skills. 6 Textbooks used for technical writing courses include resume
discussions today, but they didn't begin to do so until the late 1970s. Though
it is probable that resumes were used in some job application situations before
World War I, the primary place where resumes were displayed and discussed
widely was textbooks used in university business discourse classes, beginning
around 1914.7 While I do not mean to suggestthatthe authors ofthese textbooks
exactly invented the resume, I want to argue that this is the site where-for the
small, but influential audience of future business people-the resume entered
and became stabilized in American professional culture. Thus, this process of
dissemination had much to do with the characteristics of the genre even as we
know it today.
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The Instructional Context.
To investigate how the resume was disseminated into professional life requires
a brief look at the earliest contexts in which the resume received its first major
display-college courses in business discourse. Although business education
began in the U.S. in secondary schools and private business colleges after the
Civil War, written discourse instruction at that time was generally limited to
penmanship, shorthand, typing, grammar, and usage (Knepper 53-62). Business
discourse took shape as a serious academic subject only after college courses were
developed, beginning at the University of Illinois in 1902 eeks "The Teaching" 206) and continuing into the next two decades. Indeed, the period between
World War I and W orld War II was a time of enormous expansion of business
as a field of study at the university level. During this time "almost every
important public university in the United States established a school of
business" (Pierson 42-43), and schools of business increased in number from
about twelve in 1910 to over 100 in 1929 and about 120 in 1939 (Gordon and
Howell 21) . Virtually all of these programs eventually had courses in business
discourse.
Unfortunately, especially for the development of the resume, such courses
were theoretically flawed right from the beginning. That is, designers and
teachers of such courses assumed that their job was to train business students
in the genres being used in the world of work (Bossard and Dewhurst 106); in
today's terms, their unstated assumption was that the classroom would in some
way be able to replicate the bu.siness context. However, as recent written
language acquisition theory has pointed out, classroom contexts can never really
replicate a business world context (Freedman, Adam, and Smart 222). In fact,
to acquire fluency with any genre, writers must be immersed in the actual
rhetorical context in which that genre is typically used (Freedman 244). Doing
so helps the person understand (and to sense) what the genre's properties are and,
especially, what functions they perform. The opposite ofthis-trying to learn
a genre outside the context in which it is typically used-"decontextualizes" it
(F reedman 224). In such cases, for instance, a teacher might provide students
with models so they can imitate some of the genre properties, but the students
usually learn only the formal properties of the genre (style, arrangement,
cohesion) ratherthan how to adjust those properties to contextual variables.
This appears to been the outcome in many early business discourse courses,
which "emphasized the stylistic and formal aspects of business writing" rather
than more complex contextually-variable rhetorical concerns (Russell, Writing
in theAcademic Disciplines 129).
This decontextualization problem was made even worse by the backgrounds
of most instructors of the courses. If the instructors had themselves been
experienced readers of resumes and application letters in the normal contexts in
which they were used, they might have been able to overcome the
decontextualization problem by drawing upon their own experiences-for
instance, by bringing real resumes to class for discussion and offering sage advice
r:w
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 97
for how to write the new genre. Unfortunately, this was not the typical situation.
In the first twenty or thirty years of the existence of college business discourse
courses, most teachers were little more than outside observers to the contexts
they were supposedly replicating. 8 After all, the "insiders"-university faculty
members who did have some recent experiences in top level, decision-making
positions in the business world and thus might have understood the resume more
rhetorically-did not want to teach business discourse courses (Russell, Writing
in theA cademic Disciplines 127). As a result, to staff the courses, most universities
sought the help of their English departments, where few insiders were to be
found. The fact was that, in many programs, "heads of the English Departments
were glad to find anybody willing to do the work" (Creek 6). Herbert Creek,
himself one of the first teachers of such a course, categorized his fellow
instructors as either those "very few who knew something of the subject" or
those who had "superficial connection with business or might merely be
regarded as 'practical'" (6). The former-the ones who might have been able to
situate the resume for their students into a reasonably authentic rhetorical
context-didn't last long teaching the course. Often, because of their nonacademic orientation, they were able to slide into higher paying work in the
business world (6). Besides, many of them just didn't fit in to English
Departments very well. Such was the case, for instance, of Houston McJ ohnston,
who taught in the first few years of the course at the University of Illinois.
Although McJ ohnston' s business world experiences probably gave him some
special insight into teaching the course, his business world experiences also made
his Department Chair, Stuart Pratt Sherman, suspicious of him. Creek 0 bserves
that "Professor Sherman did not particularly like [McJohnston] and would have
preferred a literary scholar who knew enough about business to teach the course"
(qtd. in Weeks "The Teaching" 205).
Creek's second category of teachers-those who knew little about the
subject-was the prototype for business discourse instructors. These faculty
members instructed their students in writing resumes and, thus, had a key role
in the dissemination of the new genre. Unfortunately, these instructors "scarcely
knew what to do with the business writing course" (Weeks "The Teaching" 208).
Creek admits, for exam pIe, that when he began teaching the course he "knew
nothing about business letters except a few things not to do" (6). Instead, the
backgrounds of nearly all of these teachers was literature, and most had also
taught college composition. For instance, Thomas Clark, the first teacher of
business writing at Illinois, was acomposition teacher; the second, Thomas H.
Guild, taught nineteenth century literature and organized the U niversityTheatre
(Weeks "The Teaching" 207). Alta Saunders had been a high school English
teacher before coming to the University of Illinois on an appointment to teach
business writing. Edwin Hall Gardner's notoriety was as a composition teacher
who had written a preface to an edition of Woolley's Handbook o/Composition
(Weeks "The Teaching" 209). George Hotchkiss, "the college professor most
responsible for establishing the modern teaching of business writing in Ameri-
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can colleges and universities," was a composition and literature teacher, first at
Beloit and later at New York U niversity (Weeks "The Teaching" 207). Of course,
these instructors very likely called upon their experiences as composition
instructors to help them teach their business discourse courses, but the current
traditional pedagogy that dominated early twentieth century composition
teaching (Berlin; Connors) was hardly a solid theoretical foundation for
understanding an emerging genre such as the resume. Had they been fortunate
enough to be teaching today, these instructors would have had access to
professional journals and theoretical tracts. None existed, of course, since the
field was brand new. Business discourse historian Francis Weeks surmises that
some instructors did go to actual business contexts, where they requested
samples of genres being used in those contexts and then designed assignments
based on what was "actually being written in business" ("The Teaching" 208).
Though he doesn't doubt their sincerity or diligence, Weeks does question how
capable these instructors were of setting "standards for what was good and what
was not" ("The Teaching" 205). In short, it seems likely that these instructors
simply didn't know the genres well enough to evaluate their use.
Thus, when it makes its appearance early in the century, the resume is set
up to be shaped by an odd set of forces: though it is a genre used in the business
world, it is disseminated by academicians trying to replicate the business world.
Certainly, there were other business world genres (the business letter, the
manual, the report) that were taught in the academic context; however, since
these genres' histories in the business world predate courses in business
discourse by many years, the genres were already stab Ie and, thus, less susceptib Ie
to pedagogical shaping. Plus, these other genres were well known, seen daily by
a good many people in business contexts, and thus stabilized by their common
use. But the resume, largely invisible to most users, was still highly unstable and
susceptible to pedagogical shaping during the first thirty or more years of the
business discourse course.
The Textbooks
It probably is no exaggeration to say that many of these college business
discourse instructors learned about the genres they were supposed to teachincluding the resume-from reading textbooks. Because so many of these
instructors also had taught college composition, they naturally came by that
strategy; after all, as Connors points out, for years college composition instructors had learned about writing from composition textbooks (178). Speaking
about his own beginnings in the classroom, Creek admits with a certain amount
of irony that "I became an expert in businesswriting ... byreading a textbook" (8).
Though the first college level business discourse book was Edward Gardner's
Effictive Business Letters, published in 1915 (Weeks "The Teaching" 212), books
written for other markets were probably used through the first twenty or so years
of the course throughout the country. In fact, looking at them today, one sees
how most of them were interchangeable, able to be used for courses in secondary
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 99
school, commercial school, or university. Willis Westlake's How to Write Letters:
A Manual o/Correspondence, a high school book published in 1876, probably
received some use in early college courses as did others appearing in the first
major flurry of secondary school business discourse books between 1913 and
1914 (Knepper 133). Another source of books for college teachers to use before
Gardner's book appeared were those written for a popular market (Weeks "The
Teaching" 204) , especially ones written by Sherwin Cody. His 1906 book Success
in Letter Writing, for instance, was a prototype for the textbooks written for
business discourse courses (DaniellO).
Unfortunately, like the instructors, many ofthe textbook authors had not
worked in business contexts, certainly not as hiring officers who would have read
applications for employment. Westlake served as Professor of English Literature at State Normal School, Millersville, Pennsylvania. Cody, a failed creative
writer who taught school briefly, eventually became a professional writer and
editor of books, more than 150 of them in all, over subjects ranging from
literature to astrology, hypnotism to housebuilding (Daniel6). Cody's real forte
was writing home study books for business discourse. Although he was
recognized as "the country's leading business communication authority" (Daniel
9), Cody was no more knowledgeable than were most business discourse
instructors when it came to understanding how business genres were used. In
fact, his concerns tended to be with forms-the" outward rather than inward
aspects of business" (DanieI8}-instead of how forms interact with rhetorical
contexts. Like Cody and Westlake, the earliest authors of business discourse
textbooks for the college market also had few personal experiences in business
contexts. As one might expect, all were teachers-for instance, Creek, Gardner,
Hotchkiss,9 and Saunders. In particular, those textbook authors who, as we will
see, first introduced the resume had largely academic credentials: Ion Dwyer
(Principal ofthe Bristol School, Taunton, Massachusetts); Peter Maclintock
(professor ofEnglish at University College, the University of Chicago), Rupert
SoRelle (Instructor and Head of the Typewriting Department at Gregg College
and professional textbook writer for Gregg Publishing Company), and].F.
Zerbe (professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh).
If these authors used outside consultants-people from the business
world-to help them prepare their materials, there is no direct evidence of it in
the books. In fact, evidence of such consultants doesn't show up until 1955 when
C.W. Wilkinson,].R. Menning, and C.R. Anderson's Writingfor Business published source-based information about resumes. Instead, it is most likely that
the early books drew upon each other. lo Specifically in their discussions of
letters, these authors also drew upon the tradition of letter writing manuals,
whose ancestry stretches back to the Middle Ages (perelman; T ebeaux). At their
best, these manuals from antiquity contained models accompanied by theoretical
discussions taken from Ciceronian principles (T ebeaux 77; 83); most often, at
their worst, letter writing manuals offered little more than formulas including
stock phrases (perelman 113-114). Formulaicletterwriting manuals served the
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commercial needs of the British middle class during the Renaissance (Tebeaux
81); similar manuals enj oyed tremendous success in the U.S. during the nineteenth century (Locker 179) and were the forerunners of books by Westlake aid
Cody as well as books influenced by these two (Hagge).
The Resume, the Books, and the Exclusionary Principles.
Right from its earliest display in these textbooks, the resume was saddled with
exclusionary features, even when the resume wasn't yet the separate, freestanding genre we think oftoday. In fact, in the earliest textbook versions (19141924), the resume is not even technically a genre, but, rather, it is a sub-part of
the letter of employment application. In the tradition of Westlake (111-112) and
Cody (93-95), the employment application letter is astandard topic in most
business discourse books during this period. ll The resume-as-a-part-of-anapplication-letter, or as I will refer to it here, the "resume-in-Ietter" configuration, appears in the employment application section of three books published in
1914: Dwyer's The Business Letter, Maclintock's The Essentials o/Business English,
and SoRelle' sAppliedBusiness Correspondence. Up to this point, application letters
shown and discussed in business discourse books had been made up entirely of
prose paragraphs. However, while the letters in these three books have prose
beginnings and endings, in the middle they consist of tabulated sections-often
composed in sentence fragments-sub-dividing the candidates' qualifications.
The resume-in-Ietter configuration as shown in Figure 1 is SoRelle's version
(315), which features indentions and syntactic parallelism to highlight the
tabulated section:
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 101
X462 Tribune,
Chicago.
Dear Sir:
This is in answer to your advertisem.ent for a stenographer:
My education, experience and qualifications, briefty, are: I am a graduaie of the
shorthand department of Brown's Business College, Peoria, and also 'Of the Peoria
High Scllool, a schllOI that is on the accredited list of the State University. I can take
dictation rapidly and transcribe it quickly and ac:curate1y_pe1ling correctly, and placing
the punctuation and capitals properly.
I know howTo arrange a letter tastefully on the letterhead.
To file a letter properly-or to find one that has been filed.
To use the mimeograph and other duplicating devices.
To fold a letter.
To make out a bill correctly.
To meet callers.
To keep the ".ffairs of the office to myself.
To attend to the mailing so that the right indosures will go with the right letters.
I fully understand the uses of common business papers, such as drafts, checks, receipts, invoices statements, etc.
t
I am twenty years old and live at home.
I have had no experience. but my course of training has been thorough and has
duplicated as closely as possible actual business conditions.
May [ not have an opportunity to demonstrate my ability? The salary question
we can safely leave open until you have had a chance to' see what I can do.
Very truly yours,
Figure 1: Resume-in-Letterfrom SoRelle
Maclintock's (215) version (Figure 2) is much like SoRelle's, although it
combines numbers with the tabulation of sections:
381 NORTHFIELD AvE.
PlT'rSBUlW, P A.
January 14, 19 ....
Mr. John Waoomaker
Philadelphia, Pa.
Sm:
I am a stenographer and want to improve my position. I am
writing to you because I feel that my services would be valuable in
your house. I have the following qualifications:
1. Rapidity and accuracy in taking notes and in typing. I
have a record of 110 words.
2. Knowledge of the requirements of the position in a
large office.
3•. Enthusiasm for my work and a desire to give complete
satisfaction.
My preparation and experience consist of (assume details).
DEAR
I enclose copies of letters of recommendation and the names
of references.
If you have a vacancy at present, I desire to apply for it. If
not, will you file my application for future use'
Very truly yours,
(MIss) MAlty A. LooAN.
Figure 2: Resume-in-Letter from Maclintock
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Dwyer's version (91), as shown in Figure 3, couples headings with tabulation: 12
Gentlellen:I wish to say. in answer to your advertisellent tor a
stenographer. in to-day's Journal, that IIY preparation and
qualitications are as tollows:-Age: 21.
Nationality: American.
Habits: Good.
I neither slloke nor drink.
Education: Co_ercial High Sohool--shorthand course.
(Speed in shorthand and typewriting mentioned here.)
Disposition: Work harlloniously with associates.
Experience: [Here the positions held. if any, and the reasons
for leaving are stated definitely. If inexperienced. training in school
ia mentioned.)
Salary: Nine dollars a week at start.
Yours truly.
Figure 3: Resume-in-Letter from Dwyer
Some properties shown in these three versions ofthe resume-in-Ietter force
candidates to construct themselves within much narrower confines than they had
in a conventional letter of application. For instance, the severe spatial control
is immediately clear: what the candidates can say about themselves must be
tabulated and squeezed into a fairly small space. If a writer's explanation is too
long, it simply can't fit. A second control is that sentences are largely absent,
replaced with phrases. This textual feature limits writers' options immensely; it
is much harderforwriters-especially those who don't do it very often (which
is the case with application letters)-to create a sense of who they are ifthey don't
have full sentences to operate with. Writers normally can't say as much with
phrases as they might with sentences: one page of full paragraphed prose text has
more words available for a candidate to use than does a page of tabulated blocs
containing phrases.
Though SoRelle and Maclintock just show models without commenting on
them, Dwyer's discomfort with the resume-in-Ietter configuration indicates that
he may have been aware of problems with this new version of the application
letter. He admits that the resume-in-Ietter "is more of a tabular statement of
qualifications than a letter of application," and he cautions readers that it "is less
frequently used" than the other versions given in his models (91). Nevertheless,
the resume-in-Ietter caught on, and it passed from book to book over the next
ten years, 13 appearing in Walter Smart's How to Write Business Letters (1916),
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 103
Hotchkiss and Drew's New Business English (1916), Charles Barrett's Business
EnglishandCorrespondence(1919),LouiseBonneyandCarolynCole'sHandhook
for Business Letter Writers (1920), Earle Davison's TheMaster Letter-Writer (1921),
and Edward Dolch's Business Letter Writing (1923).
By the middle 1920s, textbooks began portraying the resume as a separate
genre instead of a part of the application letter. At this point, the exclusionary
features become more permanently a part of the resume as we know it today.
Although he doesn't show an example of it, Dolch refers to a document sounding
much like a resume apart from the letter, "tabulated on a separate sheet" (244).
In his 1924ElementsofCommerciaIBusiness,J.F. Zerbe for the first time promotes
the resume as free-standing genre; as shown in Figure 4, Zerbe's prototype looks
and reads amazingly like a modern resume:
QuALIFICATIONS OF MR. SAMUEL CROMPTON
Personal:
Age. 25; unmarried; height. 5 ft. 7 in.; weight, 156 Ibs.
Habits: good; does not drink; smokes moderately; likes outdoor
sports.
Associations: member of St. John's Episcopal Church; active in
the Elks and Odd Fellows, and member of the Arts Association.
Health: very good, rarely sick..
o Personality: see photograph attached.
Education:
Textile Arts School, graduated, 1917.
Temple College, attended night sessions, winters, 1913, 14, 16, 18.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, finished night course in
design, 1915.
Home Study Course, Correspondence Institute, pursued courses in
caxpet designing, show card writing, textile weaves and design,
1912-16.
&perience:
General Design work, The Textile Mills,
1917-23 $2500
Asst. Carpet Designer, Frankford Mills,
1915-[7
1800
Ornamental Designer, Clay Pottery Works, 1914-15 1500
Architectural Drafting, Christopher Wren Co., 1912-14 1400
Teaching and Drafting, Christopher Wren Co., 191o-U
lOCO
References :
Mr. Theodore Lee, General Manager, Textile Mills, Philadelphia
Mr. John Mercer, Asst. Supt., Frankford Mills, Philadelphia
Mr. Joseph Aspdin, Pres. Clay Pottery Works, Philadelphia
Mr. Richard Artwright, Instructor, Drexel Institute, Philadelphia
Rev. Samuel Benedict, Philadelphia.
Address: 19752 Gloucester Avenue, Philadelphia j Telephone,469J.
Germantown.
Figure 4: Data Sheet from Zerbe
104]AC
Although it takes a few years to catch on, business discourse books quite
regularly present the resume as a separate genre by the 1930s: Henry Burd and
Charles Miller's Business Letters: Their Preparation and Use (1930), M.A. Shaaber's
TheArt o/Business Letters (1931), John McCloskey's Handbook o/Business
Communication (1932), Walter Smart and Louis McKelvey's Business Letters
(1933), Maurice Weseen's Write Better Business Letters (1933), Herbert Hagar,
Lillian Wilson, E. Lillian Hutchinson, and Clyde Blanchard's The English 0/
Business (1934), Earle Buckley's How to Write Better Business Letters (1936), Alta
Saunders and Herbert Creek's fourth edition of TheLiteratureo/Business (1936),
and Harvey Marcoux'sA College Guide to BusinessEnglish (1939). As is commonly
the case when new genres develop, the terms used to refer to the resume were
unstable at this early period. Most commonly, "data sheet, ""personal record,"
"personal history," "personal profile," "personal sheet," "record sheet,"
"specification sheet," and "supplementary sheet" are ways used by these authors
to refer to what we today call the resume. 14
It is here, then, during these critical formative years between Zerbe's book
and Marcoux's, that business discourse books gave the resume many of its
exclusionary features. As noted earlier, the tabulated bloc format was built into
the resume by 1914. Dolch carries this tabulation even further by prescribing
specifically that "education, experience, and references" make up the superstructure to be used in those blocs (244). In other words, job candidates following
Dolch's suggested superstructure were reduced to showing one kind of self: the
professional self. Other textbook depictions of the resume add further exclusionary
features. For instance, the subjectless sentence that Faigley objects to so much
appears in discussions and models in books by Smart and McKelvey (391),
Weseen (220-221), and Zerbe (257-258). In Zerbe's discussion, one of his
hypothetical job candidates, "Mr. Robert Livingston," uses the subjectless
sentence to discuss himself as if he is referring to someone else. In fact,
"Livingston" is so detached from himself that he can even begin his resume with
this introduction that refers to himself in the third person: "Mr. Robert
Livingston, Albany Avenue, Cambridge, Mass., whose qualifications are given
below, has prepared himself for this service. When in need of an advertising man
consult him" (Zerbe 258).
Even more than their predecessors (Dwyer, Maclintock, and SoRelle) did,
the business discourse textbook authors of the twenties and thirties generally
show resume-data sheets depicting the self as an amalgam of facts. After the
resume secedes from the letter of application, these authors find separate
functions for the two genres: the resume-data sheet is a drab, self-effacing genre
that plays the straightman to its more colorful, self-revealing counterpart, the
application letter. Burd and Miller in particular try to clarify this relationship,
characterizing the resume-data sheet as a way to rescue an application letter from
being "a dry recital of names and dates" {476}-which, in other words, is
precisely what the resume-data sheet is. Similarly, Weseen says thatthough the
letter must reveal "much about personality" (221) , the resume-data sheet should
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 105
be nothing more than "a chronological record of ... employment" (220).
Likewise, Chester Anderson sees the resume-data sheet carrying "routine data,
which kill personality in the letter" (Saunders and Creek 492). And, for Marcoux
the application letter contains "the most telling points" about the candidate
while the resume-data sheet carries all other facts (288). Even names used, such
as the prosaic data sheet, reveal a good deal about how these textbook authors
wanted their readers to see the new genre. It is likely that, in order to depict and
stabilize the emerging resume-data sheet, these textbook authors employed a
strategy used through the years by other people trying to characterize new genres
(Haefner 265): they sought an existing, flourishing genre they could use as an
analogue. One genre analogue these authors seem to have found suitable is the
formal report. Dolch hints at such an analogy when he tells readers that his
prescribed resume-data sheet superstucture sets sections apart "similar to
subheads in a formal report" (244). In the resume-data sheet, then, the only self
consisted of a set of facts.
Related to tangible exclusionary features embedded in the newly emerged
resume by portrayals of its form and its contents is these textbook authors'
assumption about the inherent complexity of the genre. In short, the authors
depict the resume-whether resume-in-Ietter or resume-data sheet-as a simple
genre. Further, the depictions of the resume that come after Zerbe's book are
nearly identical in form and content: they all have headings, indented sections,
phrases, subjectless sentences, and factual information as content. Thus, almost
immediately in the history of the resume, these textbook depictions simplify and
reduce its range of possible properties. In short, there is a clear resumeformula
in the making here. These early books tend toward discourse formulas anyway
(Russell, Writing in theA eadem ie Disciplines 127), and no doubt the predisposition
towards such formulas is part of the ancient letter writing text tradition that
influenced these authors. Whatever the reason, though, the unfortunate part is
that, when a formula is applied to an emerging genre, it prematurely stabilizes
the genre, too quickly creating closure on its possibilities, blocking the "struggle
between competing formulations and innovations" that is vital to the health and
existence of any genre (Bazerman, "From Cultural Criticism" 64).
The most regrettable exclusionary feature built into the new genre, however,
is not so immediately recognizable in either its form or its contents. Rather, it
has to do with the genre's central operational metaphorthat Faigley objects to:
that the resume is an advertisement for the self, a means of marketing the self
as commodity. In a way, because the authors had initially depicted the resume
as part of the application letter, it was natural that the resume should come to
be regarded as a sales document. After all, the textbook authors had already used
the self-as-commodity metaphor in depicting the application letter. For
instance, Smart tells readers that the goal of the application letter is "to sell the
applicant's services" (20) while Alexander Candee's Business Letter Writing (1920)
portrays the application letter as "a letter written to sell" (231). Charles Buck's
The Business Letter- Writer's Manual (1926) shows the application letter as the
106]AC
"highest type of salesmanship because one is selling personal equipment" (114),
and Gardner (1915) tells candidates that the writer of an application letter "is
trying to sell his most important commodity-himself" (307).
But there may have been other reasons forthe way that the textbook writers
came to depict the resume as a sales document. For one thing, there were
curricular links between advertising and these early business discourse courses.
In fact, the very first college course in business writing at Illinois included
salesmanship as part of its contents (Weeks "The Teaching" 205); later, as the
demands for such courses grew, there were three business discourse courses, the
third of which was sales correspondence eeks "The Teaching" 204). Another
factor influencing textbook authors to regard the resume as a sales document
might have been the fashion of considering all business letters as advertising.
This idea probably derives from Cody, 15 who says in his preface to Success in Letter
Writing that "real letters ... should be works of art to win a customer and get
his business" (18). One final reason why these authors came to see the new genre
as a sales document may have been the craze of advertising theory, which had
been introduced to many academics by Walter Dill Scott's The Theory of
Advertising, published in 1903. Business discourse historian W.P. Boyd, who
finds a link between Scott's book and two early business discourse textbook
writers (Gardner and Smart), believes that afterthe 'teens most college business
letter textbooks in some way incorporated the ideas of sales strategies and
advertising (37). Boyd identifies the "terse, space-saving style ofthe advertisement" (40) as being an especially influential dictum from Scott's book; indeed,
in this one phrase Boyd could easily have been describing the predominant
formal properties of the resume.
r:w
Conclusion
The "official resume," as I have used the term in this paper, is exclusionary,
especially when it comes to the self it can show. As I have suggested in this paper,
early in the century the authors of business discourse textbooks helped to
stabilize the newly developed resume, and at the same time they disseminated it
to students taking business discourse classes in university schools of business
across the U.S. While the number of students learning about resumes through
this forum was small at first, through the twenties and thirties more and more
students were exposed to the resume in such courses and through such books. 16
The textbooks copied other textbooks, and over time the resume became
established as a fundamental part of professional job pursuits, learned by
students in school and practiced by them in job application contexts. But within
this process of genre dissemination were circumstances that ultimately affected
the characteristics of the genre itself. For one thing, the pedagogical context in
which the resume appeared was quite shaky. Part of the problem was the
assumption that a genre can be taught outside its natural habitat-a business
world genre taught in an academic setting. To use terms from David Russell's
latest scholarship ("Rethinking Genre"), the genre was developed in one
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 107
"activity system" but intended to be used for another. Moreover, the earliest
instructors and the textbooks they wrote were not well-grounded in first-hand,
experiential knowledge of the resume.
If, on the other hand, business discourse textbook authors had been steeped
daily in rhetorical situations in which they had to receive and act upon
application letters and resumes, they might have endowed the new genre with
more variations-greater "plasticity" (Bakhtin 78)-than what they came up
with. It seems likely that, eighty years ago when job seekers created resumes
without ever having seen real ones, there were probably enormous differences
among their own renditions of the resume. Strange as it may seem, this is even
true today: in spite of the wide dissemination of the official resume by popular
media, textbooks, and self-help manuals, there are surprising differences among
resume properties considered acceptable by readers in actual job search situations. A study conducted by a colleague and myself of successful resumes in
actual job circumstances gave us a glimpse of some of these differences, including
differences in ways that writers construct the self (Popken and Conklin) . We
found a good many properties we had never seen promoted by any textbook or
article. For instance, some included tables and figures, some didn't use
subjectless sentences, some had full prose paragraphs, some went on for five or
more pages, and a number had sections in which the candidates indicated
personal facts such as religion, family size, and marital status. We even saw two
collaborative resumes submitted by married couples. And, perhaps most surprising of all, we also saw some resumes that were identical to the old resume-inletter configuration. No doubt there would have been even more diversity of
possibilities shown in actual examples of the resume in its earliest days.
Unfortunately, since they had no access to such examples of the genre, the
textbook authors who framed this official resume operated more like Bishop
Lowth, whose personally-invented rules for correctness have plagued English
usage for two centuries (Smitherman 828-829). Most often the textbook authors
probably relied on what they did have access to-the advertising craze, the
prescriptive tradition of letter writing manuals, and their own self-invented
genre analogues-to characterize the new genre. Had they been able to look at
a greater number of options, they might have given us a genre with greater
rhetorical possibilities.
Of course, these authors might also have perceived the resume differently
had they been able to foresee some trends that took place much later. Some of
these trends eventually made the resume's exclusionary features even worse than
they had been. For one thing, the authors couldn't have known that the resume
would completely outdistance its companion-the application letter-in cultural importance, thus upsetting the letter/resume balance many of them
advocated: the letter showing personality and human presence, the resume
showing impersonality and detachment. Unfortunately, in the later stages of the
twentieth century, the letter of application has lost much of its influenceinNorth
America, and in many professional contexts the resume has taken overthe letter's
108]AC
function.!7 By the 1980s, the resume had become such a cultural phenomenon
that resume writing services sprang up in major cities throughout the U.S.; by
contrast, such services don't exist solely for the purposes of producing application letters. Even more telling is the fact that there is now a Professional
Association of Resume Writers, which certifies people to write resumes professionally (Kennedy" A Few Tips" S1D); again, by contrast, no such certification
process exists solely for application letter writers. Therefore, with the application letter having declined in importance, these days the resume often has to go
it alone. And, considering the exclusionary features built into it, alone the
resume simply isn't capable of carrying out a function such as the one Weseen
had identified for the application letter in the 'thirties: "Personality plays an
important part among the applicant's qualifications. His application letter, in form
and in content, reveals much about his personality. Its tone and attitude reveal even
more" (221).
Another trend that the authors of early business discourse books couldn't
have foreseen is how universal the resume has become in professional fields.
While the textbooks these authors wrote were aimed solely at students planning
careers as business people, stenographers, and secretaries, the resume today is
an obligatory part of the job application process for professionals ranging from
nurses, public school teachers, and engineers to public relations executives,
social workers, and automotive technicians. Of course, it is yet possible that the
official resume may evolve to fit employment application contexts in these
different discourse communities (Charney, Rayman, and Ferreira-Buckley) .
The early textbook authors also couldn't have foreseen the political and legal
controversies bearing upon hiring practices and, ultimately, on the resume. Even
though throughout this paper I have been critical of the resume these authors
depicted, what they did promote actually permits more of characteristics of self
to be shown than the modern version does. That is, some early textbooks
encourage resume writers to include special "Personal Information" sections
that--albeit in a limited way--provide glimpses into a broad selfhood of the
candidate {usually age, height, weight, health status, marital status, nationality,
religious affiliation, fraternal membership, hobbies, etc.; (see, e.g., Zerbe, Figure
4). Of course, this is also the kind of information that discriminatory hiring
practices have often drawn on, which is why it is discouraged by purveyors of
today's official resume (e.g., Olney; Hutchinson; Pibal; McDowell; Harcourt and
Krizan; Stephens). And yet, these new exclusionary features further limit a
person from constructing a person rather than just a job candidate on a resume.
As a result, modern resume writers have to rely heavily on indirect means to
demonstrate personal characteristics that they would like readers to know but
can't really just come out and say {Popken" A Theoretical Study"}. Unfortunately, this "reading between the lines" is a risky endeavor, one that can easily
result in misreading (Popken "An Empirical Study").
Few people, of course, wish to go back to a resume with the kinds of
references to the self-religion, gender, national origin-that would might
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 109
encourage job discrimination. But an interesting attempt to create a more
humanistic resume appeared in the third edition of Carl Naether' s The Business
Letter,publishedin 1953. Naetherproposes aPersonal Qualifications Summary
(PQS), a major rethinking of the resume that attempts to transform it into a genre
that essentially reunites the application letter and resume. Concerned about
spatial controls in the resume (217), N aether urges job candidates to expand their
presentations: whereas a resume is normallyoneortwo pages, aPQS isathree-,
five-, or even eight-page document, formally bound with a title page addressing
it to its intended reader. Although he discourages candidates from providing
racial or religious information because of discriminatory possibilities, N aether
does encourage candidates to "furnish whatever personal information [they
deem] pertinentto employer and job" (222). Samples ofPQSs he shows written
by job candidates "Frank Scott Chandler" (230) and "Calvin Guffey" (231) are
more than merely factual treatments of their work lives; these PQSs also interpret
and evaluate their abilities and goals. Unfortunately, no other business discourse
textbook picked up on N aether's idea, and since this was the last edition of his
book, the PQS went unpromoted.
Of course, while the circumstances may have been lamentable, we can hardly
blame the writers of business discourse books for their inability to shape a more
diverse and humane genre. After all, in addition to the factors mentioned above,
they were in other ways trapped in their own historical context. As historian
Arthur Smith observes:
The impetus for ... business English instructors was the "times." Shortly before and
afterthe turn ofthe century America was becoming a business nation. It followed that
America's education was urged largely as a good preparation for success in doing
business. (43)
The goal of these instructors was, after all, to serve students who were trying to
get jobs.
Today there is a hopeful sign in the evolution of the resume. With the
explosion of interest in the Internet, there is now a new means by which resumes
are being disseminated. Job candidates can now display their resumes on line
for anyone who happens on to them. In short, the shape and contents of resumes,
which in an earlier day were only be disseminated through idealized, textbook
versions, are now available for anyone to look at. This new dimension in the
history of the resume should prove interesting. Has the rhetorical context for
the resume expanded so broadly that even the official resume will change? Will
"creative" web-page resumes or even hypertext or interactive resumes ultimately
bend or even break the existing genre? Will the exclusionary features built into
the official resume in its earliest stages hold up? Will the resume as it is officially
promoted eventually become diverse, personal-perhaps even humane?
Tarleton State University
Stephenville, Texas
110jAC
Notes
I As has been the case in the growing body of theory (e.g., see Bishop and Ostrom; Devitt;
FreedmanandMedway,GenreandtheNewRhetoric;FreedmanandMedway,LeamingandTeachingGenre;
Miller; Swales), I use the term "genre" to refer to "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent
situations" (Miller 159).
'I assume a distinction between the resume and the curriculum vitae, a longer, more detailed genre
used in job searches in post secondary academic contexts in the U.S. (Kennedy "Overseas Recruiters"
39D). In other words, though they are similar, the CV is a different genre, typically practiced in
significantly different rhetorical contexts than isthe resume. To borrow terms from David Russell's
latest work ("Rethinking Genre"), the resume and CV serve as tools in different "activity systems."
What I discuss in this paper may in some way apply also to the CV, but I don't have evidence to make
such an argument.
3 Though he doesn't referto any of them, F aigley might have cited a large number of articles in
the popular media that use this self-as-commodity metaphor. For instance, see an article appearing in
McCall's entitled "How to Sell Yourself in a Resume."
4 All of these experts prescribe what the resume should be like (for a summary, see Popken and
Conklin 138). This closely monitored and controlled version of the resume I later call the" official"
resume to distinguish it from the versions used by some actual writers in real job application contexts.
Though Faigley doesn't say so, I believe that this official resume is what he is talking about in his
criticisms.
'The first one published is by Hornung in 1944.
6 Of three major ones listed here only the ones by Edlund and by Lyons and Martin even discuss
the resume. As I will maintain throughout this paper, the resume was established in business discourse
textbooks some twenty-five years before these two books were published in 1939.
7 Thesetextbooks come in anumber of different incarnations, and they appeared in courses having
a variety of titles. Some ofthem are about business letters, some are about anumber of business genres
(letters, reports, manuals), some include sections on speaking, some are largely grammar and usage.
Because they are often hybrids of these types, I use the term "business discourse" to cover all of them.
S To be "insiders," they wouldhave to have been participant-observers in the process of screening
applicants. Even today, some evidence shows a gap in genre knowledge between participants in the
actual context of reading resumes foralivingand those who teach the business communication courses.
In a study comparing resume content preferences of corporate hiring officers and business communication instructors, Harcourt and Krizan found at least ten areas (out of seventy options) where the two
disagreed significantly.
, Yates implies that the gap between Hotchkiss' knowledge of business contexts affected his
textbooks. She points outthat there were areas in which "someofthose [business people] in the trenches
were giving very different advice" than Hotchkiss and Kilduff do in their book (Yates, Control Through
Communication92).
10 Hagge points out that while these authors largely rely on each otherforideas they normally do
not credit their sources (42).
II I base my discussion on a survey of major business discourse textbooks published from 1902
through 1939. Although not all the books have discussions of resumes in them, I provide a list of them
in the works cited section of this paper.
11 In one example in Hotchkiss andDrew's New Business English, published in 1916, the prose is
diminished even further. Essentially the only prose that is left is an introductory sentence andaclosing
sentence (216).
1] Though the resume-in-letteris eventually replaced by resume-data sheet, it does linger for along
time, continuing to show up in business discourse textbooks even as late as 1957 in John Riebel and
DonaldRoberts' Ten Commandments/or WritingLettersthat GetResults(48).
14 The term "resume" appears forthe first time in Carl Naether's 1936 edition of 1heBusiness Letter
(149). However, in his use of the term Naether means the resume section in the resume-in-letter
configuration. The term" data sheet" held on for many years, and, in fact, was still being used as late
as 1975 by Weeks ("Data Sheets"). For clarity, I am using the invented term "resume-data sheet" to
distinguish the full genre version ofthe resume from the "resume-in-letter" configuration.
The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre 111
15 Danielspeculatesthat Cody's personal obsession with money had much to do with this view
of all business writing. During his years as an undergraduate at Amherst College, Cody existed "under
financial conditions so constrained[that]they left deep scars on his memory" (Daniel4). In fact, later
in life he seldom spoke about his curricular experiences at Amherst but was more likely to speak in
meticulous and relentless details of finances: digging a cellar at fifteen cents an hour,
renting an abandoned room forten dollars a year, buying fourteen dollars worth of used
furniture, and always wearing one shabby fifteen dollar suit. (Daniel 4)
16 Estimating the exact number of people to whom the resume was disseminated through these
means is difficult. A conservative estimate might coincide somewhat with the numbers of graduates
from schools of business during these years. Nationally, degrees awarded to business students went
from 1576 in 1919-1920to 6376 from 1929-1930 and to 18,549 from 1939-1940 (Gordon and Howell
2 t). We can assume that, since most universities were developing business discourses classes during
this period, most of these students would have taken such acourse (though, of course, not all classes
necessarily used a book, andeven if they did, not all books covered resumes) . No doubt more students
were actually enrolled in courses than actually finished school,so there may have been more users than
the graduation rates indicate. Further, since these books often crossed over from institutional type, it
is likely that there were readers beyond just those in university business discourse classes.
17 As part of research by Conklin and me that has yet to be published, we asked thirty-six hiring
officials in a variety of professional fields about their attitudes toward the application letter. Most saw
it as a useless document. In particular, government personnel officials disliked letters since they had
the potential to add too much subjectivity to the hiring process.
18 This paper contains many ideas that catneout of dialogues with my late friend Douglas Conklin.
I hope some of his presence has made its way into this article. I also want to acknowledge Robert
Connorsforinsightfu~encouragingadvicein afive-minuteconversation in February 1994. Finally, my
special thanks to the Tarleton State University Organized Research Committeeforfunding atthevery
beginning of this project and to Greg Etzel for help with graphics.
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