Cover letter

Dear Sir,

We have received your recent draft of your manual targeted at undergraduates applying to our graduate program. In reading this document, there are several things that occur to us. In principal, we believe this document has the potential to provide a useful tool to equip our advisers with, particularly in conjunction with the other materials you have submitted to us. In general, we feel that the document is well on it's way, but there are several things we feel it would be beneficial for you to implement in your final piece.

The only specific item we feel needs to be reworked significantly is the introduction you have written for the manual. While this is good, we feel that you can do better in convincing the students to make use of your document. Given that an adviser may, or may not actually sit down with his advisee and walk them through the document, this section may be all that convinces the student to make use of this document for it's intended purpose.

Next, we would like to see a checklist or worksheet included that will assist the students by keeping them on task. Perhaps the section of items that are required in addition to an application would be a worthy addition to such a worksheet.

The included components of your document are by themselves each useful, but in order to be more effective in providing assistance to the students, we recommend a slight reordering of the items. We feel that your presentation will be more effective if you move items like the Dates to the front of the document, where such a location will stress their priority. Similarly, other similar items may be best utilized in such a location, with exposition following afterwards.

We would also like to certain items expanded upon. Principally, we would like to see the Important Dates and Contact Information further fleshed out. There are other entities that a student will need to deal with, particularly if they did not attend this school as an undergraduate. Likewise, Dates could be further expanded to encompass other considerations, like Financial Aid and such concerns as recommendation requests .

Lastly, after these expansions are performed, and a final order is reached, we feel it may be beneficial for you to include a brief table of contents, principally as a preview of what the document holds for the reader, so that it will aid in their assessment of it's worth.

We feel that if these changes are implemented in roughly this fashion that your document will be well suited to our needs.