Initially when I was working on my first draft for writing project 3 I was writing directly into the XML document replacing team fours example texts with my own words. However, in doing that my statements felt disconnected and scripted. For this reason I ultimately ended up writing the majority of my intro and background paragraphs in word and then transferring it back over into XML. It was nice to have the example texts in the schema template to understand what they meant by each of the tags. I found it more useful though to use the teams presentation as a starting point for the context of my letter. I did find the schema’s overall layout to be broad enough to cover any possible rhetorical situation that would lead to the writing of a cover letter. Being able to order your background in different ways while still prompting you to include personal, academic and work related experience was quite helpful given the fact that my situation may have been slightly different than that of other people writing a cover letter. It would have been nice to be able to use the reasons tag multiple times within the background sections, but it worked out regardless by just grouping it.
Receiving my peer review was tremendously helpful as I think it gave me an idea not only of how to fix the things that I asked about but also because he pointed out things that were missing or unclear that I had not previously noticed. Overall I think that the schema was very straightforward with the example text that was included. I do think that some of the tags within elements could have been better defined, but generally plenty of labels to be sure that you included all the necessary elements.
Using another groups schema was fairly straightforward though it did not have the benefit of already knowing examples and how the schema breakdown matched those examples. Potential things to change:
- being able to include multiple reasons for things
- unsure of the purpose of the page break element when everything is already so broken up
- being able to include a space under your salutation before your typed out name to allow room for a signature
- a place for a date at the top of the document somewhere
