I used the Cover Letter schema/template mostly as it was written originally, using it as an outline to structure the document, using all (or almost all?) of the elements. The schema served as a stable basis for the project, and I used the elements as prompts for content. In the body paragraphs, I wrote the content and then tagged it with the more minor elements, but in the rest of the document, the elements presented in the template served as prompts for which content I should put where. The schema itself felt highly appropriate for the situation, as it contained all of the relevant information and followed examples found online/other sources, and maintained the structure and brevity of the genre itself. Some elements, such as the intent, reason, and proposition, were incredibly helpful, as I would not have known to delineate those as three separate items. Most of the critique and feedback during the peer review, in both directions, was more focused on content, as both followed the schema rules themselves perfectly. We had similar styles of markup, and overall in this relatively cut-and-dry genre, there isn’t a lot of room for creativity. In terms of specificity, the background section is slightly broad, as to what constitutes personal vs. school vs. work in some specific situations such as volunteer research work (which is in a sense all three), though ultimately it felt okay to leave that up to the writer to decide where something like that would fit in terms of balance and flow.
Overall, this schema is radically different from my WP2 schema, in that it feels like there is much more inherent structure, and though the order of the background content is flexible, overall the genre/schema itself felt much more of an outline to fill in rather than a flowing journey almost fully up to the discretion of the writer. It was a nice change of pace in some ways. Ultimately, I feel this genre model/schema gets the job done. More elements could be added for greater specificity for the background section, but that would also complicate and clutter that section perhaps unnecessarily with the extra tags. I am content leaving the model largely as-is moving forward.
