Building Genre Knowledge. Christine Tardy
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heard of a cover letter before the WCGS unit. In fact, during the same time as this class unit, Paul also attended a workshop led by a major computer company (referred to here as “Micron”) in which professionals spoke to computer science students about résumés and the job application process. Even in this workshop, he was not made aware of the role that cover letters often play in job searching.
The writers’ novice background with this genre was typical of the other students in the class and in my experience is also typical for many international graduate students studying in the U.S. One possible reason for this shared lack of experience with cover letters is that genres—that is, the typified response to a recurring rhetorical situation—are realized in different ways in different social and cultural contexts. Some countries, for example, carry out this action (introducing a job application) through other textual means, such as application forms or oral interactions. For students from such countries, the cover letter—including its formal, rhetorical, and process dimensions—will be unfamiliar. A second possible reason that this genre was so new to the writers that I followed could lie in their own histories and trajectories. Even in the U.S., where cover letters are fairly common, college students, graduate students, and first-time job seekers often get by without writing them. Job fairs, on-line job sites, and social networks all provide rhetorical scenes that can make the cover letter an unnecessary genre. In other words, many U.S. graduate students may also have no prior experience writing cover letters, though they would most likely have heard of them before and perhaps even seen them.
Cover Letters in the Writing Classroom
In WCGS, the résumé and cover letter were presented as linked genres and were turned in together as one assignment; nevertheless, the procedural or rhetorical relationships between the two texts was never explained or discussed in depth in the classroom. Michele told me that she chose to teach these texts because she felt they were “indicative of the very weird American discourse forms” (August 28, 2002) and provided an opportunity to focus on related grammatical conventions of form like gapping and parallelism. She sequenced this unit after the first course assignment—a writer’s autobiography—because she felt it represented a natural progression from a more informal and personal way of writing about oneself to a more formal and public style. In teaching the cover letter, Michele wanted to provide the students with a range of samples written in different contexts and with practice in adapting those samples to their own needs. An additional goal was to help students become more familiar with what Michele called the nuances of language, particularly in relation to describing oneself. She saw this as a difficult rhetorical task which she hoped to help students become more successful in.
The résumé/cover letter unit was covered in 11 class days (see Table 3.1), including one-on-one conferences that took the place of several class sessions. The four writers that I followed attended each class session and both of the conferences in this unit. While Michele made use of many instructional strategies for awareness-raising, typical to genre-based pedagogy, she never used the term genre during this unit, nor did she ever explicitly discuss how the awareness-raising strategies might be applied to other genres.
Table 3.1 WCGS schedule for unit on résumés and cover letters.
| Day | Date | Topic |
| 1 | Sept. 9 | CV/résumé contents |
| 2 | Sept. 11 | CV/résumé contents; gapping |
| 3 | Sept. 13 | CVs vs. résumés; parallelism; peer editing |
| 4 & 5 | Sept. 16 & 17 | One-on-one conference with CV/Résumé |
| 6 | Sept. 20 | Sample cover letters |
| 7 | Sept. 23 | Cover letter templates; formality and language |
| 8 | Sept. 25 | Cover letter format and structure in different contexts |
| 9 | Sept. 27 | Discussion of cover letter samples; peer editing; email requests |
| 10 & 11 | Sept. 30 & Oct. 2 | One-on-one conference with cover letter |
Because few of the students were familiar with cover letters, most of the class sessions on Days 6 through 9 were spent examining and discussing sample letters. By presenting students with a wide range of examples, Michele hoped that they could select what they liked from various letters. Six of these sample texts were job application letters, including three written for jobs in industry, one for a graduate research assistantship, one for a postdoctoral position in molecular biology, and one for an assistant professor position in rhetoric and composition. In addition, Michele provided three cover letters of request asking a professor for a letter of recommendation, and four email request letters, with varying requests. She included these non-job application letters for the benefit of John, who would be writing this type of a “request cover letter” as he prepared applications for PhD programs. To some extent, then, the term “cover letter” was used somewhat ambiguously and its various uses and forms were never fully teased out within the classroom. However, because “the cover letter” was situated within a unit related to job applications, most of the students interpreted the term to be equated with job application letters.
On Day 7 of the unit, Michele distributed two quite different job application letters and asked the students to work in pairs to create a “template for a generic cover letter” (Class notes, September 23, 2002) based on their observations of the samples. Two pairs of students wrote their templates on the board; these are reproduced in Figure 3.2. As the figure shows, both pairs identified a similar basic format of (1) self-introduction/purpose for writing, (2) qualifications and experience, and (3) closing remarks. Their structures generally mirror Bhatia’s (1993) moves of establishing credentials, introducing candidature, enclosing documents (found only in John’s and Tae’s template), and ending politely. They exclude his moves of offering incentives, using pressure tactics, and soliciting response—the first two of which Bhatia claims are less common.
Much classroom discussion also centered on specific sentences in the sample letters and the ways in which they may be interpreted by readers. Michele frequently asked questions that explored relationships between formal and rhetorical features of the genre, such as “What are the differences between the letters for different types of jobs” or “How much of a specialist would you need to be to understand this?” Discussions addressed the formal language style and the connections between style and intended audience. The students generally preferred the shorter letters for more general audiences. In fact, there was strong negative reaction to a sample letter written for an academic position in the humanities. In commenting on this letter, these engineering and science students disliked both the high frequency of jargon and the lengthy prose.
On Days 8 and 9, Michele extended the discussion of cover letters to request letters, including requests for letters of recommendation (attached to a résumé) and email requests. The former were included to address the needs of one student, John, who was hoping to request letters of recommendation from some of his professors. Michele also recognized that requests can be rhetorically challenging, so she incorporated a 20-minute classroom activity in which students examined four email requests that she had received. She asked students to read the emails and try to determine the relationship between the sender and receiver, in terms of familiarity and status, exploring the ways in which social relationships are indexed through texts. Students noted variations in word choice and formality, and asked about how common different phrases were. The inclusion of letters of request may have helped students to draw connections between this genre and the job application letter, but, as I shall show later in this chapter, only John made these connections explicit in discussing the assignment with me.
The WCGS classroom discussions were interesting to observe for several reasons. They showed that the writers did have preferences for some forms over others, despite being unfamiliar with the genre. In some cases, such as the reaction to the lengthy humanities job application letter, these preferences may have been influenced by the discourses of their hard science disciplinary backgrounds. For example, the long sentences and paragraphs of the humanities letter are likely to contrast rather sharply with the hard science preference for more concise text. The classroom discussions also gave students a chance to see how their peers and instructor reacted to the different texts, or even to very specific phrases within those texts. While