How do you go about determing what writing sample to give to an employer?

What type of job are you applying for? How much of it involves written communications? And would this be your first job after graduation?

i left out the type of job so that i could get a wider variety of answers but since you ask :) it is to manage a website for a political campaign. most of the writing actually comes from much higher up than me, but occasionally i will get to add captions and such to pictures.

not my first job… like my 6th or 7th…? (but i just graduated college about a yr ago)

Depends on the employer. Advertising copy? Political campaign speeches? newspaper reporting? technical manual writing?
If you can’t give him a sample of what he will want from you professionally, safest thing to send might be something like an editorial type piece on some current, interesting topic.

@anartist so are you saying write something fresh?

I would look for
1. Freedom from all typos, misspellings, and careless use of punctuation, first of all.
2. Clarity of expression.
3. Grammatical accuracy (but probably not to a standard of absolute perfection).
4. Appropriate style and tone.
5. Evidence of intelligent thought.
6. Facility.

I also zero in on certain kinds of mistakes. I watch for unevenness, which suggests (but does not prove) a helping hand, and wrong word choice, which indicates a poor command of the language in general.

The ideas expressed also tell you something about the person, perhaps more than the writer realizes. I would read between the lines and infer something about personality and character.

If you would be in charge of the public face of a campaign online, they will need to know that you won’t embarrass them, that you will make them look good, and that you won’t introduce errors.

Papers on some academic subjects might show your skills to better advantage than others, but any will show gross deficiencies if you have them. Depending on how many applicants they have and where you are in the process, the writing sample could be used to eliminate candidates rather than to select them, so avoiding negatives could be more important than exhibiting positives.

Edited by me: In a general business sense, a piece that makes an argument or an explanation would be good, or something that demonstrates simplification of language.

You may want to have someone read it over before you give them the writing sample. A former teacher or employer, or someone working in your field, could give you some great feedback on whether this piece is appropriate and offer suggestions on how to improve it. It helps to keep in touch with people like this anyway, because there will be plenty of other times when you’ll need advice and help from a mentor.

@alive yes, if you have nothing appropriate. If you have something like captions you’ve written for a website, that might interest them. Or something you have written about politics. Are you going to be a writer or an editor?

@Haleth, that’s a good suggestion as far as choosing a sample is concerned.

If I were the prospective employer, however, I would really want to know if I were seeing the candidate’s own work because he’s going to be on his own in the job. I want to know what he can do and not how good an editor he has. That’s why I look for signs of a helping hand—that is, evidence that the sample was improved by someone other than the candidate.