By Monday, January 28 at midnight

Reading

• Read about the rhetorical concept of kairos ("the right or opportune time to speak or write") in Kairos and the Cover Letter, which includes some exaggerated approaches that you should avoid in your cover letters.
• Read "Preparing the Cover Letter" and "Parts of the Cover Letter" (TH, pp. 224-225).
• Read Cover Letters 2: Preparing to Write a Cover Letter, ~ on the OWL
• Do some research into the potential employer organizations you've chosen. Consider the following: Who is your primary audience? the people you want to influence most directly? Consider age, gender economic class region, ethnicity, education level, and so on. Which of these traits is most important in this writing situation? Do you have a second audience, and if so, whom does include?(adapted from TH pg 20)

By Wednesday, January 30 at midnight

• Step 1 of the Employment Project should now be completed. Your weblog should contain your job search activity/inventory, your two jobs ads, and your job ad analysis.

Reading Response

• In a blog post, write a short profile of the employer organization to which you will be applying. What size? Where located? Provides what goods or services? What stated goals or mission? Also consider the job ad itself. What kinds of key terms and concepts can you use to describe your own skills and experience, to tailor your cover letter to address the specific requirements for the job?

By Friday, February 1 at midnight

• Step 2 of the Employment Project: Drawing on the information you have collected through these activities and assignments, draft an effective cover letter, tailored to the job and organization you've chosen.
  
• Review the sample in The Thomson Handbook, p 225. Your letter should be context-specific (should address the skills and experience, etc. asked for in the job ad) and should contain the required five parts (heading, greeting, opening, persuasion, closing) in the format shown.
• Your letter, in PDF format, should be attached to a blog post along with your resume in Week 5 (see Announcement below). (Read Creating PDF Files if you have questions about how to convert a document to PDF

Peer Review

Announcement: Peer Review of Cover Letters has been combined with your peer reviews of resumes, both which will now take place in Week 6. It will be useful for you to see and review the two documents together and get a feel for how one supports the other. Given that, you can make the best use of the extra time by creating the most effective job search documents possible for peer review next week.

• At the end of Week 5, you will post your cover letter and resume as pdf document attachments for peer review.
• Peer review: In Week 6 you will review the cover letter and resume as a set, using the response questions linked to the calendar. Peer reviews should be blog posts, not attachments. Title of peer review posts should include the writer's name.

Remember to post your 5 comments/replies for the week.

• Also due: Complete and submit your Week 4 Blog post activity report.

Check out Week 5 . No later than today, you should read through the course calendar for the following week. Make sure that you understand all of the assignments. If you have any questions, email the instructor.