portfolio questions

[R Greenberg <roxanne_98 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

I'm going to be job-hunting soon, so I'm in the
process of preparation. I have a few pieces of writing
from my current job that I think would be great for my
portfolio. Trouble is, one of them is 20 pages long,
another is 28, and the third is 10 pages. From what
I've heard, this is much too long - that the average
portfolio shows only 3 or 4 pages of each piece of
writing.

However, I would like to show the entirety of each
piece because I want to show structure and
organization as well as the writing itself. The person
looking at it wouldn't be expected to read the entire
thing, but rather to skim most of it, observing the
general pattern and maybe reading small parts of it in
depth to get a sense of the writing itself.

What are people's opinions on that? Does this seem
like a reasonable way to do it?

Another question: I'm in my first technical writing
job, which I've had for almost 3 years, so all the
samples I'm considering using are from this job.
Therefore, I can't ask my employer if I can show the
samples to other companies on job interviews. :-) What
do people do about this? I need to have something to
show, and these would be excellent examples of
different kinds of writing (one is conceptual, one is
procedural, and one is reference). Is it reasonable to
just use them anyway, without permission? I was going
to say that I'd blank out the company name, but
they're going to know where I worked anyway. :-)

Thanks for any suggestions or opinions.

Roxanny
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