English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

The idea of putting the same header on your cover letter as is on your resume seems very backwards to me as well. One of the driving points in the readings is that you do not want your cover letter to just be a rearranged version of your resume. You want it to give new, more defining information on you. Seems to me that if you made the exact same header that it would put the wrong idea of its intent into the readers head. If that's the case then I think the reviewer would be more likely to judge both documents more negatively.

That is true that most people just write how they talk. I will admit that I try to write as fast as I can writing everything on my mind. I think texting and instant messaging is ruining a lot of people's technical writing skills. It is interesting that you are a helper in the writing lab. Taking what you have learned as a writing assistant will probably make it easy to write a cover letter. Your degree in psych would probably not let the HR person fully understand your experience in science. I think that your cover letter will drastically help your chances in getting the job.

The idea of me writing my cover letter the way I talk or trying to write in a conversational style also does not make sense to me. I want to try and make the best first impression to my possible future employer as possible. My main goal will probably be to make myself sound like the best possible candidate without being too laid back (conversational) or too formal. In my eyes the best thing to do is just to sound professional without making a fool out of yourself by overdoing it. Sometimes it is easy to see when someone is trying to sound too professional and trying too hard, especially for a HR representative.

We do want to understand that when we discuss a conversational tone in a cover letter, we don't mean a conversation with your best friend. There is a difference between a conversational tone and a colloquial tone, which would be writing like you speak, more or less. As Kristin suggests, writing is not just speech in print form; writing is its own entity, and the conventions that govern speech and writing are different. Also, we have to acknowledge that even if we were to speak to the hiring personnel, our manner of speaking would be quite different than it would be when talking with friends. Our conversations with our bosses are different in form and content than those with close friends, and they should be, because the relationships are different.

What our readings mean by a conversational tone is that you should keep in mind that you are writing a document that will be read by a real person and not a machine. As such, you want to create a tone that communicates a clear point to a person, so you want to avoid robotically firing off a list of qualifications. Put yourself in the reader's shoes. What would you want to read in a cover letter from a potential candidate? You probably wouldn't want them to be informal, presumptuous, or obsequious, but you would want them to communicate to you rather than at you. That's what conversational means, I would contend.

With regard to the cover letter header issue, it's actually a pretty common and useful practice to use the same header on both documents. Think of it like a letterhead on stationary. (In fact, that's likely what its origins are...) What you're doing is branding yourself; you're constructing a kind of ethos that manifests in form and content. It helps give you a unified, coherent package. (A more pragmatic issue is also the the resume is often separated from the cover letter, and a unified look ties them together.)