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Cover Letter
By Steve Hoenisch
Last updated on Aug. 3, 2001
Copyright 1996-2006 www.Criticism.Com
Table of Contents
1 An Outdated Cover Letter
2 Related

1 An Outdated Cover Letter

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to express my interest in working as a senior technical writer or web developer for your company's New York City offices. I am especially interested in a position documenting web-based applications or in a position that coalesces with my areas of interest or expertise: XML, theoretical linguistics, technical writing, web development, and knowledge management.

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My qualifications for such a position include programming skills in XML and XSLT; several years of experience as a technical writer, web developer, and web manager; 17 years of professional experience as a published writer and editor; and postgraduate work in the technical field of theoretical linguistics.

At present, I am working as a technical writer and process manager for Concert, the global venture between AT&T and British Telecom. At Concert, I am developing, managing, and documenting provisioning processes for the launching of a global IP network called Concert IP Select, which offers class of service-to-application mapping and traffic shaping on high-capacity connections for virtual private networks.

Before joining Concert, I worked at AT&T, where I was the lead technical writer and intranet developer for the Managed Internet Service. I was responsible for spearheading and managing all technical documentation projects and for managing and building its Knowledge Management System, or KMS, an intranet with thousands of files. In this position I wrote extensive process documentation, documented proprietary applications, organized a huge site with a JavaScript table of contents to simplify navigation, developed and maintained indexes for hundreds of documents, and managed a large-scale, book-length documentation project.

While at AT&T, I also trained engineers to use proprietary software and to provision businesses like CNN and Microsoft with such internetworking services as asynchronous transfer mode, frame relay, and high-capacity private lines (T3, OC3). In addition, I served as process engineer and project manager for the provisioning of several high-profile AT&T IP services during their launch.

My postgraduate academic work -- I was in the Ph.D. program in theoretical linguistics at the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center -- has consisted of courses in, among other subjects, computational linguistics, which has honed my technical writing skills. The research and writing I have done in computational linguistics is highly technical, as the field stands at the confluence of linguistics and computer science.

Before entering graduate school, I worked for more than seven years as an editor at such daily newspapers as The Hartford Courant, the New York Daily News, and American Banker. My experience as a journalist has given me wide-ranging writing and publishing skills that would, I believe, enable me to manage your large-scale technical documentation projects and lead your technical writing staff with precise, all-encompassing editorial direction.

I have also worked as a freelance writer, with articles appearing in, among other publications, the Chicago Tribune, The Salem Evening News, The Hartford Courant, Willamette Week, Travel Smart, and Snow Country magazine. Most recently, I wrote a 25,000-word series of entries for The Encyclopedia of the American Democratic and Republican Parties. Links to my published and unpublished writing can be found online at http://www.criticism.com/.

My resume, which is enclosed, also reveals other aspects of my work experience related to technical writing. For instance, I have taught computer literacy and English at New York City Technical College. In past years I have taught writing to nurse managers at North General Hospital in Manhattan.

My technical skills range from solid programming skills in VBA, HTML, DHTML, XML and XSL to intermediate programming skills in JavaScript, VBScript, and Visual Basic. I am familiar with Java, SGML, Perl and CGI. I have a knack for learning new software and programming languages extremely rapidly -- and for disseminating that newly acquired knowledge to others, whether through training or documentation.

My academic training and professional experience enable me to lead and manage the development of complex technical documentation projects or web sites. Email me and let's talk about it.

Sincerely, Steve Hoenisch

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