Employment Cover Letter Purpose For our first assignment in the Businesses Communication Module, you will write a solicited cover letter to accompany the

Employment Cover Letter Purpose

For our first assignment in the Businesses Communication Module, you will write a solicited cover letter to accompany the resume you have just completed (“solicited” because you are writing to a particular job or internship posting). Remember, your resume targeted a job or internship in the major you will choose, and argued for getting you an interview. The purpose of this cover letter is to further your argument by summarizing and elaborating on skills and experiences you could only list in the resume. The letter will be your first opportunity to show a manager, vice president or team leader how effectively you communicate. You’ll write many employment cover letters over the course of your career; you’ll start out with a relatively conservative version.

Audience

Like the resume, your audience is the person who can hire you. We assume that your reader doesn’t have time, so you’ll need to present your evidence in the most efficient way possible. However, you are not required to provide an attention-getter in the opening paragraph, even though the text emphasizes that most employment cover letters use this approach.

Content and Organization

The letter must have well-developed content.If you make any explicit or implicit claim about your skills and experience, you must support it with concrete descriptions (evidence) proving that you have those skills. That evidence must be as specific as you can make it; the letter must not rely on vague generalizations to support your argument. You may repeat information listed on your resume as long as you elaborate on that information in the letter.

Resources

We will rely exclusively on the traditional (conservative) Angela Riggs cover letter sample saved in the Employment Cover Letter folder on our Blackboard site. In fact, I’d like you to adapt your letter using that sample as a guide. Before you begin, however, I strongly suggest you review the learning outcomes and samples in the book (pp. 520-524).

Format and Design

For this, our first formal letter, I’d like you to mirror the Riggs letter format and design as closely as you can. You might review business letter forms outlined briefly in Appendix B (pp. 561-564).