Journal 8: I got a lot of valuable feedback from my group during peer review. It was nice to get a perspective other than my own, and they caught a lot of things that I hadn’t thought of. The primary issues were format and fleshing out my paragraphs more. The tricky thing with writing this cover letter was ignoring a lot of what I learned from academic writing (indenting paragraphs, double spaced, etc.); it looks really odd to me. I added more contact information at the bottom and had my name and address on separate lines, as someone brought up I had too much white space in my cover letter. I also added some more concrete details like my specific work experience and my major. I had to rework some sentences to make it flow more smoothly. I thought our group was really respectful of each other and gave constructive feedback. Usually I get a bit nervous giving feedback as I don’t know if I’ll always have something to say, but I found it easy and comfortable in our small group. I’m also glad we opted for less but larger groups to be able to get a variety of feedback. I thought the feedback I gave and received were really helpful and I’m happy with how it went.
Journal 10: Before this assignment, I’ve only had to write one cover letter and I had no idea how to do it properly. Now that I’ve read about cover letters and wrote one myself, I definitely have a greater understanding than before. I’ve learned a lot about how much academic and professional writing is different. It took me some time to get used to it, but I thought this was a great way to practice writing an important document. There would be a lot more on the line if I wrote an ineffective cover letter for an actual job rather than for an assignment. I think this has really prepared me for when I do have to write a cover letter for a job, and I feel a lot more confident in my skills. I thought having peer review was really helpful. My group pointed out a lot of things that totally went over my head, so I’m appreciative of the feedback I received. A lot of what I needed to work on was formatting and not necessarily the content itself. Overall, I thought this project was a huge success and what I’ve learned will for sure come in handy in the future.
