The schema was helpful to my writing. The cover letter was short, but seeing how the sections were organized along with the samples helped me sort my thoughts. It was appropriate for the rhetorical situation.
The last sentence of my first paragraph may not fit in the <proposition> tag. I wanted to emphasize my enthusiasm in joining the company rather than saying that I have the necessary skills since I felt that that’s explained throughout.
I accidentally excluded certain tags (<accomplishment>, <skill>, etc.) from the schema because I had overlooked them, but inserting them after finishing my draft didn’t bother me.
I want to add a “site” attribute to the <contact_info> tag. That would help for displaying portfolios. I also would like to add an <interests> tag that works like <programs>, <accomplishments> and <skills> because that feels like an important point that doesn’t entirely fit in those three categories. Additionally, it would be nice if the <proposition> tag included something else to the description to suggest an enthused statement to join (see my mention above about this) or a separate tag with attributes of “proposition” or the other. That’s just a suggestion from when I was writing though. It may be too specific. Other than that, I noticed there’s no place for an actual signature, which is typical of cover letters.
I like this genre and schema. It was clear and nice to follow. I kept putting off writing a cover letter because it intimidated me, but I’m really glad that I got to do this. The sample one was easy to follow and work from.
Edutainment blogging was a cool genre, but it was very fuzzy and difficult to work with. My second project was heavily image based, so I had to worry a lot about display. Thus, this genre was a very nice change of pace since it was short and all text. It also targeted a narrower audience. Not authoring the schema allowed me to focus on my piece rather than on structural or display problems.
