Block 1: Profile

OK, so what sort of profile might I write for this photo…….?

Katy (Caitlin Rose). Retriever. White/Golden. Very original white wedding present. 10 x dog / 70 x human years old.  Pedigree as long as your arm (or longer). Half a neurone (if that) to her name, poor love. Heart always in the right place. Forever desperately trying to ‘do the right thing’ in any and every circumstance – just totally unsure and incapable of working out quite what that is. Permanently worried with a ‘far away’ or ‘lost’ look in her eyes and pink paws from nervously licking them. Runs away with legs turning like Meep-Meep in the Roadrunner cartoons from any unexpected noise or from ‘bags that have no right to be there’.  Think she must have had a bad experience with another family before she was re-homed with us at 8 months old.

Loves people but hasn’t tried to eat anybody whole yet!  Rounds us up like a sheepdog at home and hates it when her ‘sheep’ move from the places she has assigned them.  Has developed a ritual around her dog bowl: when it is dinner or breakfast time she will check that I am putting food in the bowls, walk out of the kitchen door and wait in the hall until she sees her bowl set down. Then she will make her ceremonial entrance, but will wait until someone sits down beside her before she starts to eat. 

Photogenic.

This photo is called ‘Katy the Half-Dog’ in recognition of her half-neurone!

Runs like the wind. Hates running water (rivers etc) but adores plunging headlong into deep, dirty puddles and rolling to her heart’s content. Strangely, for one so weird, loves snow and the deeper the better: her favourite trick: bounding in 80cm snow drift, diving under and crawling like an oversized, crazy white Mole (a ‘taupe’) to surface somewhere else 20m away just to surprise you: we call it ‘snorkeling’.  Oddly, she does this whenever we are in Germany and it snows! Hates riding in the car – sits in the rear seat well, jamming herself between the seats. Does not support ‘dozyvet’ tablets (dog-calming and anti-nausea tablets)… even at half the recommended dose for her weight, she is totally spaced for two days at least… let her off the lead and she leans so much to one side she just goes round in one very small circle like a toy train on a track until she stops and leans against the car before she falls down!

OR…. I could have done this NOT in the 3rd person, but in the first, as KatyDog herself….  The point is that there are many ways of doing a profile….

So, what is all this about?

YOUR TASK for this block will be to write and read a Personal-Professional Profile:

As I need to know a bit about you and your level of English, I would like you to imagine that this is the first day at your new job (you can imagine the job you would like to do after L3), and your new ‘boss’ asks you to prepare a ‘Personal-Professional Profile’ in English  to go directly on the company’s website and in its magazine (print/web-ready copy).

« The company’s standardised approach to profiles embodies the following principles:

• The personal-professional profile MUST be of no more and no less than ONE, FULL page of close-typed, single-line-spaced, A4 in  nothing more than 12pt and nothing less than 10pt sized font. 
• For interest’s sake it may include modestly-sized images (covering no more than 30% of the page surface) .
• It MUST not only say something about your academic, professional and personal life and background, but also demonstrate/showcase your character, personality and sense of humour which will make people want to meet you and work with you.  This is most emphatically NOT a cv/résumé.  [It is the company’s tradition that each profile contains a surprising piece of information about you or your life that no-one would guess from looking at you….]
  
• This is to be printed out and submitted to Mr Jolley personally exactly one week after the task has been given to you. « 

Back into ‘tutor-mode’ for a minute:

• I will ask you to read out some of it in class then submit the hard copy.
• You will get two marks: one for the written and one for the reading.

Please take this seriously and follow the instructions to the letter.  I not only want to see that you can exercise some English, but more specifically that:

• you can follow instructions (failure to do so in a workplace situation tends to lead to problems!)
• you have a good sense of design and how to present things professionally on the page – if it isn’t actually attractive – why would people want to read it (even in brilliant English)? All of you need to develop this skill – your whole careers are going to involve presenting information after all!