Building Genre Knowledge. Christine Tardy

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      I believe this is the truth, and I used the truth from their computer is good company, and so I use the fact. And I was looking for the perfect sentence to describe that one, and I found this sentence. And using- starting from “Having been . . . ,” not always starting the “I” or “You.” But I think this is more elegant than what I usually write. (October 16, 2002)

      Yoshi also makes use of the lexical pattern of paired phrases found in Henry and Roseberry’s (2001) corpus of cover letters—for instance, “engineering and management experience” and “education and experience.” Use of such paired phrases may help emphasize an applicant’s attributes, but Yoshi’s use of these pairs appears to be more motivated by borrowing from sample letters that contained these phrases, as I’ll explain below.

      One particularly interesting feature of Yoshi’s cover letter is the final paragraph in which he uses the “pressure tactics” described by Bhatia (1993). Yoshi explained to me that he liked the final paragraph of his cover letter, but he admitted that this was not the Japanese writing style that he was accustomed to:

      I [would] never say this in Japanese [laughing], but if I- I felt this is a English cover letter, even [though] I don’t think this, but I’d better advocate like this. (October 16, 2002)

      In fact, Yoshi commented rather extensively on the difficulty of promoting himself in an U.S.-style cover letter. He believed that the hardest part of writing such a document was “to describe myself objectively” (October 16, 2002) and to not come across as arrogant. He contrasted the Japanese style of self-promotion with the U.S. style, and he admitted that he felt awkward writing in the more aggressive U.S. style:

      Japanese tend to write modestly [about] myself. But to write in English, you tend to write more aggressive- you’d better write aggressive. So I am not accustomed to write that way, so it is- I feel strange still. (October 16, 2002)

      Specifically, he felt that the frequent use of “I” would sound selfish or arrogant in Japanese and would thus be avoided as much as possible in a Japanese letter.

      This conflict in his own positioning as a writer seemed to pose the biggest challenge for Yoshi in writing the cover letter. Although he was aware of the conventions and expectations of the U.S.-style cover letter and was willing to adopt these conventions, he felt awkward in doing so. In the end, Yoshi’s understanding of the differences between the Japanese and English rhetorical writing styles in this genre may have led him to overcompensate in the final paragraph, which may strike many readers as overly confident. It may be that Yoshi was unaware of the tone established in this paragraph, or that he simply adopted another discursive identity when writing in English, at least for this particular task. The borrowing of others’ words became, in essence, the borrowing of an alternate identity.

      After he had revised and turned in the final draft of his cover letter, Yoshi explained, “Through this experience, I learnt it is important to write a distinctive letter to get a job. Do you think that is right?” (October 16, 2002). He expressed knowledge of the larger application process in which a cover letter existed, saying that he believed the cover letter was a key to impressing the employee, which may then help the candidate secure an interview. When asked what he thought made a letter distinctive, Yoshi astutely responded, “one’s experience and the rhetoric to describe this more like the fact” (October 16, 2002). In Japan, on the other hand, he felt that issues such as pedigree, experience, and age would make a candidate stand out to employers.