Writing Lesson: Don't Use Hard Sell Techniques Unless It's a Paid Advertisement

This also appears on my education blog:

 https://huston-china-international-education.blogspot.com/

Although I've been away for a while, it does not mean I've forgotten or abandoned teaching. And, as always, if something holds legitimate interest for you, reach out to me and send a message or leave a comment.

Today we look at an issue that's been itching at me for a long time --the best way to explain educated norms to low academic ability, first generation college or other adult basic education adult learners. While all of these students have made an important first step to get ahead and improve their lives, anyone who has interacted with or taught them knows that in many cases the obstacles to their advancement are many.

Many of these students come from backgrounds where poverty and low education is the norm. Poverty is a difficult, unpleasant thing, and the feeling of being trapped in such a condition makes it worse.  If you've never been there, imagine this. You've got a bad toothache and no way to pay for the dentist, sitting on the front steps is frightening because you live in a high crime neighborhood, you're overweight, the doctor says to watch the sugar and lose weight, and not only can you not afford good nutritional food, the best supermarkets with the lowest prices and freshest vegetables are a long bus ride away and it's not easy to carry groceries on a bus. And people look down on you, sometimes for reasons you understand and sometimes for reasons that make no sense to you at all.

And sometimes the best thing to do is to just trudge along, tell yourself it's not your fault that life sucks, and ignore the people who say things that make you feel bad.

Which, if you read the last sentence carefully and think about it, precludes and denies and reduces opportunity for growth, learning, and positive change in a person's behavior. If it's not your fault that your life is in this state, then why should you change your behavior? If the behavior is not related to the situation, then how could changing the behavior affect the situation? And so it goes in the lives of some people.

As multiple people have noted, the traits that often enable a person to survive poverty emotionally and physically are often the opposite of traits that enable a person to escape poverty.

Which brings me back to teaching such students, It's a challenge (and, honestly, not one I think I'm terribly good at it but I try and I learn as I go. Sometimes that's the best we can do. And, sometimes, when I learn something useful, I try to share it here.)

A few years back, I was hired by the local proprietary college to teach English 101. This was one of those places that specialized in recruiting first generation college students, hooking them up with government loans, placing them in classes, and then trying to keep them happy so they came back semester after semester using the loans to pay them for tuition. Sometimes they got educated in the process, but my impression after dealing with the management is that this was basically incidental to the process. The keeping them there and getting the loan money seemed to be the priority. The students who did like it said they liked it because several of the classes taught hands on skills taught by professionals in the fields where they wanted to work.

And that's what I tried to make English 101 be. I can't say I succeeded but I tried to make it practical and relevant.

Therefore my first real writing assignment after a basic (but widely ignored yet very necessary) grammar review was to have them write a cover letter for a resume.

I taught how to do this. I shared videos on how to do this. I assigned links on how to do this. And I gave them homework on how to do this.

But when the results were turned in, I was surprised by some of the results.

One was plagiarized. I told the management, and the student claimed she hadn't understood that original work was expected. I'm not sure I believed her, but whatever . . .

Another, a student who spent most of the class under the impression that my class and every other class he'd ever taken was not useful in any way and that he knew things that he clearly did not know --it was a great challenge teaching him that not only were citations required they were required because his papers often included ignorant misinformation. For instance, he turned in a paper that stated most terrorism was committed by Muslims, a statement that was both unsourced and false. When I told him this his response was "Are you calling me a liar?" I forget my response, but as I'd already been told not to give the students blunt reality checks, it was most certainly not what I considered as my first response.

In this case, he showed his lack of interest in the project by stating in his cover letter that he had a degree from the local community college when in fact he'd failed out and then come here. I never did get a good reason as to why he included obviously false info in the cover letter. (As for why he was in this school, someone had convinced him that if he wished to be a security guard, he should go to college and study law enforcement and I think he came from a background where his parents expected him to be in college. This degree was completely unnecessary as most security companies do not require such degrees. Last I saw him, he was wandering the halls of a shopping mall dressed in a rent a cop uniform.)

But others showed a completely unexpected problem. The students basically put sales slogans in their cover letters. In other words, although they tried to follow the standard three paragraph cover letter format they were shown, they'd use language like "Why take a chance on an unproven employee? Hire me. I'm the best and my record shows it." This, paraphrased from memory, came from an adult student with a good work history, and it surprised me.

Yet it was not uncommon. And it shows a lack of familiarity with norms of behavior among what I shall call "the educated class" by those who I will refer to as "the uneducated class."

One of the challenges of advancing in work or society, at times, is to brag but to do so without appearing to brag. In other words, one must let people know of your great accomplishments without appearing to want to impress people of your great accomplishments. This is, as many recognize, one of the skills or modes of behavior that one must assume when using linkedin (which exists almost entirely for self promotion) or one of the other social media forums where people try to let others know of their greatness without bragging. This is just the way it's done. I mean, anyone with an ounce or more of social awareness knows everyone is doing this but one can't just let it be seen that you are doing it. You must keep things subtle. Why? Because that's the way it's done. (Unless, of course, you're donald trump, a man who seems to delight in breaking rules)

Yet it's tough to explain this to people who do not normally travel in circles where this is not the way that things are done. Why not brag? Why not boast? Why not even go so far as to exaggerate and if you think you can get away with it downright lie?

Well, just because you don't. It's unseemly. Inappropriate. Gauche. Vulgar, and lest one forget, for what it's worth, "vulgar" comes from the Latin word for "common class."

Yet how does one not just explain this concept, but sell it to the audience who needs it, in this case, the students who need to learn to write cover letters that are acceptable and ordinary to whatever human resources people might happen to receive it?

It was not easy for me to find the perfect, succinct way to phrase this without sounding smug, judgemental, and even classist.

Or worse finding oneself trapped in increasingly circular and convoluted explanations as some of the students, as some of the students tended to do, seek to argue with the instructor for no other reason than to reinforce their view that the instructor could not possibly have anything to offer them and that nothing in their life is their own fault and therefore there is nothing to be gained by changing their behavior as there is nothing to be gained by changing their behavior because their lifestyle and its problems, and their behavior is unlinked, and the worse we can the instructor look, well, the more we can reinforce this view that we are, in fact, smarter than him and he has nothing to offer us.

And thus it was when I found myself, years later, confronted with the perfect answer.

"Don't use hard sell techniques unless it's a paid advertisement."  

It's that simple. And if the students ask why, tell them because human resources people get exposed to enough blatant, in-your-face advertisements outside of work and do not need them at work. They wish to meet job candidates who are sincere and wish to work and wish to fit in to their organizations or companies. They do not wish to meet slick salesmen who will try to manipulate them, They wish to judge credentials and experience and character, not slogans.

And if you can get that idea across, well, you've got your students writing better cover letters and made them more employable than they were before they met you.

"Don't use hard sell techniques unless it's a paid advertisement." 

It's that simple.