A Pragmatic Genre Analysis of Job Application Letters

Abstract

The search for a promising career position is very difficult and highly competitive and an appealing well-written job application letter is its crucial first step. This paper is to apply the latest genre analysis approach to 40-job-application-letter corpus. The analysis is essentially pragmatic-oriented in that its findings will not only benefit those who try to teach students how to write job application letters, but also offer genre analysis practitioners some valuable insights into the latest development of their research focus.