In general, I agree with the changes proposed for the cover letter schema. The first of these changes is to include the option for several “reason” statements within the introductory paragraph. This is something I believe our group would have agreed had we given this element more thought. As the cover letter group pointed out, this might be more useful for less technical positions, which our group did not focus on as much compared to technical positions that might be more relevant to our rhetorical situations.
Another point the group made was to have the “proposition” element in the introductory paragraph made optional. I agree with their reasoning that this could allow more flexibility in the first paragraph. However, from our research, we found that this element was fairly common in many of the samples we looked at. In this case, I would agree to make the proposition element optional, but to also add a comment or add to the definition of the element to communicate that it is also recommended. In the group’s design entry, they make the point that this element might “present a repetitive statement” depending on how their opening of their intro paragraph was written. I would argue that this constraint could help guide the writer to change their opening instead.
Another great point made by the cover letter group was to include an “interest” tag in the background paragraph. I believe this is a great addition for which the reasoning is well reinforced by the examples provided by the group in their design entry. I think this shows the importance of including more people with different backgrounds in the schema creation process. Our group of four people represented just 2 majors in the engineering discipline, which might push the cover letter to be better suited for certain types of jobs. We also only had 4 different personal rhetorical situations to reference when we discussed any possible changes. The cover letter group had several more, which allowed to draw from many more scenarios and test the schema against more rhetorical situations, which in this case made a change like this much more obvious.
