While listening to the other teams present their genre, the one I’m leaning toward using for project 3 is the cover letter. Out of the three genres, I feel like cover letters are the most relatable to me at this stage in my life. I’m at a point where I’m going to be applying to jobs or internships, so I’d imagine I’m going to have to write a few cover letters. I’m hoping that I can improve the structure of my cover letters to help convince employers to hire me. Previously when writing cover letters, I really had no idea what to write. I just wrote the first things that came to mind, and the result seemed unstructured and unorganized. I’m hoping that having the XML schema as a structure will help guide me, and I’ll be able to reproduce new cover letters when it comes time to apply to jobs.
Looking at the individual compositions created by the cover letter team, the overall structure of cover letters seems pretty rigid. There is a portion for contact information, greeting, body and closing remark, and the body is further broken down into sections. The overall tone of the letter is formal, which is expected since this is supposed to be a professional letter. From a content perspective, I noticed a majority of the letter talks about the qualifications of the applicant. It talks about the applicants previous experience in the field, and how it can be applied to the position they are applying to. Personally, I feel like this is an area I could improve on in my personal cover letters. I did include information about myself, but I was hesitant to repeat information that was already on my resume. My cover letters ended up having a decent chunk where I talked about the company itself, and why it was interested in it, but I feel like I could reduce that a little bit and include more about why I would be a good fit in the company.
