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 to an application form and statement of purpose rather than a letter. Paul had—unsurprisingly—not 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
