It was surprisingly helpful to have our schema to write my first draft cover letter. I didn’t have to think too much about where I wanted to include certain information and I didn’t feel the need to go back and reference a bunch of other examples while I was writing my cover letter. There was already a place to put everything that I wanted to say in it. It also was helpful to make sure that I didn’t miss any important points in my cover letter because i knew that certain elements were necessary; and on top of that it was necessary to put them in a certain place in the cover letter.
I did find that the schema was appropriate for my rhetorical situation. I realized that it was actually using optional elements that I didn’t think that I would need. That being said, I think that we left our scheme general enough to be able to be applied to many different situations.
I never felt like the schema was constraining. I actually felt the opposite, the schema reminded me that I needed certain elements that I may have otherwise skipped or been to lazy to think of something good to say in that place. I especially felt that the schema was helpful in putting together my introductory paragraph. I still think my introduction could use a lot of work in order to feel more natural and focused/informative, but having the schema helped me to generate what I wanted to communicate in that paragraph at least.
When reviewing my partners composition, I realized that we both understood the “experience” elements to mean different things. In each of my “experience” elements I basically filled in a paragraph’s worth of information recounting one relevant experience. So I only needed 2 or 3 different “experience” tags. He used “experience” in order to denote every sentence where he mentioned a skill or something he was exposed to. It made it so that I filled in a lot more content into my middle paragraphs than he did. As in, I listed fewer “experiences” with more detailed descriptions and he listed more “experiences” with less details about each one. This is probably something that we should discuss and nail down how we intend for it to be.
I think so far our scheme is quite effective, and aside from a couple of revisions we have already made to our definitions, that what we have is working pretty well. I think that we need to add sub elements to our “experience” elements in order to better define what needs to be included in one of these paragraphs. It might be helpful to break experiences down in “skills,” “certifications”, “languages”, etc. and then leave an open list that the writer can fill in with whatever they want, but at least having suggested sub elements would prompt the type of information that you want to include in the paragraph.
I can’t imagine trying to make up this schema with any more people. It was difficult enough to be able to hash out what we wanted to do in our schema with just 4 people. It makes me concerned that our schema might be less easy and understandable to anyone else that is less familiar with the schema. I think it would be worth re-formatting our documentation to represent what is a sub element or attribute of what so that our glossary is a little bit better visual representation of what we want our schema to be. I think it would make it easier to look up what a particular tag is if it weren’t just in a list of definitions.
