English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Not to belabor a point that Jeremy and I have made in comments to individual reading responses, but the "Kairos and the Cover Letter" piece offers the final four openings as moves NOT TO MAKE. In fact, the author explicitly positions them as things not to do:

Here's a sample job ad, with a few strategies for addressing it in a cover letter (none of which works). Some of these have been highly exaggerated to highlight strategies that are frequently misused or turn out to be highly inappropriate when judged in the context of the situation.

Don't spend too much time refining a hackneyed approach that you use invariably.

Each of the four openings shows someone more bent on emulating a style rather than on speaking to a real person hiring for this position.

So, the four different openings discussed are clearly being used as examples of things that you should not do. Curiously, a handful of comments this week seemed to get this exactly backward and discussed adopting one of the four opening methods. We strongly recommend that you do not do this, especially because the reading explicitly states that these are bad strategies and demonstrates why. Make sure that you're paying close attention to the texts when you read them.