By Chong Bretillon
Many student writers might agree that cover letters, personal statements, and resumes are some of the most difficult texts to write. Although the word count of these documents is fairly low, the stakes are often very high, as is the level of tedium and detail required to write a polished one.
Added to these high stakes are students’ lack of familiarity with the overlap between professional and personal writing. Students might have difficulty approaching the content if they are unaccustomed to writing about themselves and their own experiences. Professional writing is often an unfamiliar discipline for them, and anyone who hasn’t worked as an admissions officer or manager/administrator probably hasn’t encountered many models and samples of effective cover letters/admissions letters. Further, “rules” about writing that students may have picked up along their careers as student writers—such as “avoid using the first person” and “avoid repeating the same phrase on the same page”—often do not apply to creating job-seeking documents. Surprisingly, the opposite is also true: students are often reluctant to transfer knowledge about other types of communicative writing to professional writing. For example, they might assume that only a text-based literary research paper needs a thesis statement, but the first paragraph of a cover letter also needs a main, evidence-based claim. They might also believe that professional writing necessitates a terse, detached tone devoid of personality—while, conversely, we encourage students to write about their experience and qualities with enthusiasm.
At the Writing Center, we’ve gathered numerous excellent resources to help writers disentangle these notions about writing with a specific purpose and for a specific audience. These resources assist writers with cover letters, graduate school and grant applications, jobs, internships, fellowships, and more. In fact, they can help students improve their written communication skills in many ways; we have included many resources that provide specific textual models and sample phrasings. These guides go beyond the typical “Do’s and Don’ts” of professional writing, which are sometimes not so helpful: it is easy enough to state, “Write about your past work experience” but what that actually looks like can be a mystery for writers new to the genre.
To get started:
To alleviate any anxiety or confusion about the different types of written correspondence a job seeker might need to write, Yale provides a simple breakdown of the different Types of Correspondence.
This resource from Chapel Hill describes clearly and plainly the differences between Resumes vs. CVs. using a helpful bulleted list of what each document typically contains.
Writing the resume and/or CV:
Boston College’s “Action Verbs List” is a favorite of mine, because it saves the writer the need to consult a thesaurus in order to avoid repetitive statements. I print this out and hand it to the student during nearly every resume- and CV- focused consultation, and students are extremely grateful to see not only the wide variety of both common and less common action verbs, but also that the list is broken down into specific skill sets. Under “Management skills” one sees directed, oversaw, supervised, while the verbs created, fashioned, integrated fall under “Creative skills.” This list allows students to view the subtle differences between skill sets and to think critically about where their strengths lie.Relatedly, Purdue Owl’s Job Skills Checklist puts verbs and nouns together, suggesting new phrasing for describing past experience. I find this resource particularly helpful during my sessions because students often ask how they can “sound professional” and tailor their past work experience, especially if they have not had much, to the demands of the new position. For example, the checklist suggests two statements that could apply to many situations: developing a climate of enthusiasm, teamwork, and cooperation and providing customers with service. Either of these statements can be used as a jumping-off point for a student to further fill in some details about their work. It serves as a useful brainstorming tool for resume and CV writers.
For the application itself:
Our own Sentence Structures Used in Cover Letters document provides students with textual models to borrow, modify, and incorporate in the paragraphs of their cover letter and/or personal statement. This document is used in our Cover Letter workshop where we emphasize that cover letters are texts that entail specific readerly expectations. The reader of a cover letter will expect an introduction detailing which position the writer is applying for, an overall argument for why the candidate is the best one for the position, to be thanked, and so forth. Therefore, these model sentence structures are listed as answers to common questions about cover letter content: “How do I introduce myself?” and “How can I introduce my unique background?” for example.
Also from the aforementioned workshop, our own Cover Letter is very useful as a model and a guide. What is especially helpful is the series of arrows to the right of the model letter that state the purpose of each sentence in the document. Knowing the purpose of each statement and being able to justify its content and its reason for existing are two essential academic writing skills that are transferrable to any type of argumentative writing. In fact, I have pointed students toward this exercise in consultations that had nothing to do with cover letters to demonstrate that, just as each sentence in a cover letter has a purpose (“to introduce myself” “to reiterate interest in the position”), in an essay about, say, King Lear, the same rule applies. A student should be able to clearly see “this sentence contextualizes the scene of the play that I am analyzing” or “this topic sentence refers back to my initial claim and provides more detail about it” or what not.
Finally, University of Toronto’s Types of Admission Letters can help students identify the style of letter that they wish to write (or are actually writing). The organization of an admission letter is often the trickiest part of writing one. This resource allows students to think a bit more deeply about what type of letter they wish to write: narrative? Analytical?
Published on July 11, 2017
