Building Genre Knowledge. Christine Tardy
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genre are readily available—and, as I’ll show throughout this chapter, these resources can have a significant impact on writers who are relatively new to the genre.
Bhatia’s (1993, 1999) work provides the most extensive discussion of the job application cover letter from a genre perspective. Bhatia (1993) focuses on communicative purpose as the defining element of the cover letter genre, and he analyzes the rhetorical structure of an exemplar, drawing parallels between the job application letter and the sales promotion letter. Bhatia claims that the most important function of this type of letter is to show a favorable and relevant description of the job candidate. In other words, the writer’s task is to persuade the readers that he or she is competent and possesses those credentials that are of particular importance to the job at hand.
In his application of generic move analysis to job application letters, Bhatia (1993, p. 62) identifies a typical seven-part structure (see Figure 3.1). He describes “Indicating value of candidature” as the key step, as it is here that the writer attempts to persuade readers that he or she has the relevant experience, qualifications, or background for the position. While Bhatia provides no details regarding the corpus on which this structure is based, he exemplifies it through a letter written for a lectureship in Britain. This generic structure is, however, influenced by socio-cultural factors within any given context. Drawing on a corpus of South Asian scholarship and job application letters, for example, Bhatia (1996) identifies self-degradation as a frequently used strategy in the closing move of a letter.
1. Establishing credentials
2. Introducing candidature
a. Offering candidature
b. Essential detailing of candidature
c. Indicating value of candidature
3. Offering incentives
4. Enclosing documents
5. Using pressure tactics
6. Soliciting response
7. Ending politely
Figure 3.1. Move structure of job application letters identified in Bhatia (1993).
Using a corpus of 40 application letters written by native English speakers for a variety of jobs, Henry and Roseberry (2001) identify similar moves to those in Figure 3.1. Their analysis, however, goes further in identifying key lexical phrases common to different promotional strategies. They note, for example, the high frequency of paired nouns, verbs, and adjectives that writers use to describe their relevant skills (e.g., “background and experience” or “assess and implement”). Awareness of common features like these, the authors argue, may help second language writers compose letters that resemble those written by their native-English-speaking peers. While resembling a conventional “native-like” letter may be a goal of many L2 writers, they are also likely to want to assert an individual identity within their letters, standing out as distinct in some ways—and this is, of course, another important goal and rhetorical move of job application letters.
Beyond these studies of generic form, job application letters have not received any significant research attention—a fact that is somewhat surprising given their relative prominence in professional writing course curricula (particularly at the undergraduate level) as well as the weight that these documents often carry in a tight marketplace. Studies of the procedural dimensions of these genres in different domains would be particularly valuable. Outside of the classroom, cover letters, for example, are connected to a whole range of oral and social interactions, ranging from requesting a reference, to contacting potential employers, to more general networking. The genres act as links in a genre chain that might include job advertisements, requests for more information, interviews, thank-you letters, and acceptance and rejection letters. At various stages of this genre chain are nodes to other genres, such as reference letters, employer websites, job search websites, reference books, and online tutorials. There are also the countless social interactions that serve to build writers’ repertoires of ideas about what is effective, ineffective, desirable, or discouraged in preparing these documents.
In addition, job application letters are linked to résumés or CVs in an intertextual generic set. Bhatia (1993) describes the letter as the applicant’s opportunity to demonstrate his or her qualifications for the job by clarifying the contents of the résumé. In Bhatia’s conception, the résumé is dependent on the letter because it cannot persuade the reader on its own; it is the evidence for the claims made in the letter. Furthermore, the letter is often more variable than the résumé, as writers have even more choices about what content they may include or exclude for specific audiences.
This dependence of one genre upon another illustrates the relationship among genres in a genre set. A genre set may, for example, consist of a core genre (or genres) on which other genres are dependent. While the core genre may serve as the primary document of the system, other genres are important in navigating the system and improving the effectiveness of the core genre. I will refer to these supporting genres as linked genres, as a way to emphasize their dependence on another genre. Such linked genres require that writers have knowledge of multiple genres (the linked genre and the core genre) within the network. To Bhatia (1993), the cover letter is a core genre and the résumé is a linked genre; as shown later in this chapter, the writers I followed did not always share this relational view.
Previous Knowledge
Chatri, Yoshi, John, and Paul all came to the writing classroom with no previous experience in writing job application cover letters. That said, they did bring different understandings of the genre (along with its linked genre, the résumé) to their first encounters in the writing classroom.
Chatri had neither seen nor written a cover letter prior to the writing course, and in fact said he had not heard the term before. He had written a Thai résumé when applying for the research job he had held in Thailand, and he wrote an English-language résumé when he applied for a position as a research assistant (RA) at Midwest University, but he had not heard of a cover letter accompanying these documents. As a student near the start of a five-year (or longer) doctoral program, Chatri did not appear to see any immediate need for the genre.
Although Yoshi had written his first English-language résumé in cram school in Japan, he did not practice writing cover letters at that time. In contrast to the other writers, however, Yoshi had seen cover letters on Internet websites, and he had written what he described as “a tiny cover letter” (September 23, 2003) when applying to graduate schools. The WCGS assignment was his first real experience writing a job application cover letter. While the other writers seemed quite skeptical about whether or not they would ever write a cover letter, Yoshi believed that if he were to apply for a job in the U.S., he would use a letter similar to what he had written in WCGS. The chances of this happening in the near future, however, were slim, as Yoshi was required to return to his position in Japan upon completion of his master’s program.
Like the other writers, John had written his first résumé in English before the WCGS assignment. He found that he needed a résumé to respond to a variety of interactions with his professors:
. . . every time I went to talk to a professor about anything, he or she would say, “Do you have a résumé?” So I got tired of that, so I just made up a résumé. So that was basically what [my original résumé] was for. Sometimes I would talk to them about getting an RA position or something, so that was probably the main reason I made a résumé. (September 20, 2002)
Because he had always given his résumé to others in person, or accompanied them with an application form, John had no prior need to write a cover letter.
Though Paul similarly had no prior cover letter experience, his job application experience in general was broader than the other four writers. Before coming to the U.S., Paul had worked at a “dot.com” company in China where he was at one point responsible for some hiring; he therefore had some insight into an employer’s perspective in the job hiring process. In the U.S., Paul had written and used an English-language résumé twice before the WCGS unit: once when applying to graduate school in the U.S. and once when applying for a summer internship during the first year of his master’s program. As is typical, these documents were attached