Since we were basically able to break the cover letter down line by line, I used the schema heavily when working on my project. In many ways, I believe it was useful since I did not have to guess on what to include in my beginning and ending parts. However, I believe it may have hindered how smooth the cover letter read as a whole. While each sentence might have sounded well individually, at time I felt there might not have been a good cohesion or transition between lines or paragraphs. I think this was especially true for the background paragraphs, since we limited the sentences within this part to a single element called “experience”. Because of this, I found the xml was the least useful for this part of the cover letter. Instead, what I found the most useful was the peer review, since my peer reviewer was able to give me tips on what to include and not include, as well as how to divide the information up. I believe these parts of the cover letter are harder to capture with simple xml layouts and definitions.
I think learning about rhetorical situations probably helped our group out the most, since it placed a focus on uptake and the other genres and surrounding information we had to consider when writing a cover letter. A major decision we had to make was what kind of rhetorical situation we were responding to with our cover letter schema, which helped narrow our scope to what I think was a more useful document. We also realized the importance of a job description when working on this as well, which was helpful to further define what our cover letters were structured like. That being said, I am not too sure the readings were a big help in understanding the writing for this project. Rather, the in class discussions and examples served as a better guide to how to define and talk about terms such as uptake and rhetorical situation.
