Today’s Plan:
- Cover Letters
- Homework
Cover Letters
The ABO entry for “Application Cover Letters” identifies 3-4 purposes for your cover letter:
- Introduce you as a candidate with the skills that can contribute to the particular organization
- Explain what particular job interests you (or why you are interested in the advertised position
- Highlight for the reader specific qualifications in your resume that match the position
- Signify your desire/availability for an interview (this is a phatic closing gesture)
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing things in that order. But you might. It is tricky–you are playing a kind of meta-game with a reader (since the rhetorical purpose of your document is super obvious). The game concerns how skillfully/subtly you can perform within this charged situation. You want to consider tone–how do you come off as someone who is hard-working and professional while also not sounding too formal and/or stiff? (Unless the job advertisement and your online research suggests that they are a formal environment). Essentially, how good are you at reading the room?
Here’s where I really differ from the ABO advice: I want your cover letter to, at some point, tell me a story filled with concrete details. Tell me about a time you used writing/design/media skills to accomplish something meaningful. Take a bullet or two from your resume and bring it to life.
Know your audience! For comparison this letter and this letter.
Here’s what the cover letter shouldn’t do: it shouldn’t just summarize your resume. It should select one or two skills from the resume and flush them out, providing context and details. Don’t tell me you have experience researching grants, tell me how you partnered with the ARC of Weld County to identify and research, using both the State of Colorado and the Foundation Center databases, 13 specific grants for non-profit organizations focused on children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Or how you worked with a team of designers to produce flyers for both print and digital distribution for 8 upcoming events. Whatever. The cover letter is your opportunity to tell a story about the best work you’ve done. It is an opportunity to show us something (the resume is your opportunity to tell us something). What you did, who you did it with, what it produced, why it matters.
As the previous paragraph indicates: you should absolutely write about your experience with our non-profit partners this semester. For many of you, this is your first and–thus far–only opportunity to practice professional writing. Below I link to some sample letters–look at the way the third letter talks about the person’s experience in 301.
Also, as you read these letters, think about what you want to be able to write about when you graduate. All 4 of those letters are written by people who have pretty incredible experience. But they got that experience through dramatically different ways. For instance, the second letter talks about serving as the social media manager for a small game company. They got that job by emailing the game company and saying “hey, I love your stuff. Would you mind if I created a Twitter account for your company?” My point here is that graduating with a degree isn’t likely enough to get you a job. You also have to do stuff. Participate in meaningful extra-curricular activities. Volunteer for non-profit organizations. Develop your own Twitter account where you rate new Netflix shows. Whatever. Just do stuff. Thousands of students graduate every year with a 3.4 GPA. What can you offer them that those other 999 people can’t?
The three examples in the ABO book aren’t bad. But I feel like they could be better. They could provide more details about what someone has done (in some places they feel a bit too much like someone is narrating a resume). Let me share a few examples from past semesters.
Let’s look at a few sample letters.
