ABOUT WRITING “COVER-LETTERS”.

 
     Theoretical discussion of cover-letters.  A cover-letter is the “second document” which you send to a prospective employer – along with your resume.  Cover-letters introduce you in more detail to a prospective employer, and let you highlight certain parts of your life-history / work-history, and your abilities.  In a cover-letter, you are saying, “This is who I am, what I have, and what I can do for you.”  Therefore, you should write it well!  As with the resume, your cover-letter should actively show that you know what you want, and are actively working towards it.  Otherwise, the prospective employers will think you are “employment plankton”, passively waiting to be picked up by the “whales”. 
     In a cover-letter, you are either responding to a job-advertizement (like most people), or you are actively hunting for an as-yet unseen work opportunity, that has not yet been advertized (which means there is no competition for the job).  As with the resume, you should have your cover-letter ready to send to someone withing a few minutes!  (This is very important.)  You should have it in the form of “paper copies”, you should also have it on your “flash-card” (USB) or floppy disk, and you should have it on your Internet account storage space.  Sometimes, a prospective employer really does come “out of the forest”, and you need to be ready. 
     A cover-letter, like any text you write, should be carefully thought about over time, and follow the same steps as the earlier articles you wrote.  That is: 
       (a) Brainstorm. 
       (b) Plan – review plan – re-write the plan, to make it better. 
       (c) 1st Draft – review it. 
       (d) 2nd Draft – review it. 
       (e) Final Draft. 
     A cover-letter should evolve over time, perhaps two years (yes, two years!), and not over a weekend!  The cover-letter should be written to “tailor-fit” you and your own life’s conditions.  Therefore, do not copy some stranger’s cover-letter off of the Internet, and then “adapt” it to superficially apply to your condition.  You should make it and synthesize it from the very beginning, out of your own personal experiences, and not someone else’s! 
     If you think I am being silly here, consider this story.  It is not specifically true, but I certainly believe it happens.  Somewhere in some company’s Human Resource office, a prospective employer is sifting through 1,000 resumes and their cover-letters.  As you know, each “position available” advertizement in the newspaper brings in many, many applications.  Each resume passes under that person’s eye for about four seconds.  Is it read?   No!  Rather, the prospective employer is “scanning” all these documents (most of which look exactly alike).   What is that person looking for, in such a short flash of time?  It is not “grammar”, or “smooth words”, or “the right words”, and maybe not even “the right experience”.  Rather, it is a sort of “flavor” (that is, in Chinese cooking terms, “feng wei”; you know, as in “Hunan feng wei”, or “Guangdong feng wei”.)  A good cook can sip some sauce, and know at once that something is “wrong” with the food, in a second, and not need to know exactly what is wrong.  It does not matter; out goes the dish to the trash!  So it is with most of those 1,000 resumes and cover-letters; only about 10 or 20 will survive the “first cut”.  A good read can do this with a high level of accuracy.  What I am trying to say is that “technical perfection” in a resume is certainly not enough.  You need some thing more, to give it an authentic “feng wei”.  How do you do that?!  I am not certain, but I believe that carefully “distilling” your life experience, over time, like very good “bai jiu” into a beautifully-wrought, Venetian glass bottle, and having it ready for that “someone special” will help you to do this.  YOU ONLY HAVE FOUR SECONDS TO IMPRESS THEM, AND NO MORE.