Writing A Recommendation Letter That Helps

A recommendation letter is read by someone holding a stack of similar letters, all of them positive. What separates a useful letter from a useless one is not the strength of the praise.

Every letter is positive, so praise is uninformative

Candidates choose their own recommenders, which means the reader can assume in advance that all the letters will say good things.

Superlatives therefore carry almost no information. Excellent, outstanding and highly recommended appear in every letter in the pile, including the weak ones.

The reader is looking for something else: evidence about what the candidate actually did, and a sense of how well the writer is positioned to know.

Vantage point comes first

A letter that opens by establishing the relationship gives the reader a way to weight everything after it: how long, in what capacity, on what work, with what other candidates for comparison.

A supervisor who saw daily work and a professor who graded one course are both legitimate sources, but they can attest to different things.

Letters that skip this leave the reader guessing, and a claim of unknown provenance is discounted regardless of how strongly it is stated.

Incidents outperform adjectives

A short account of a specific situation does more than a paragraph of characterization, because it lets the reader draw the conclusion rather than being asked to accept one.

The most useful incidents involve difficulty: something that went wrong, a judgment call, a piece of work that had to be rethought.

These are also the parts a reader remembers when discussing candidates later, which matters when decisions are made by a committee reconstructing files from memory.

Length and hedging both send signals

Very short letters read as reluctance, whether or not that was intended, because a writer with a great deal to say usually says it.

Conspicuous omissions read the same way. A letter praising reliability and nothing else invites the reader to notice what was left out.

Writers who cannot support a candidate serve everyone better by declining, and declining early gives the candidate time to ask someone else.

The comparison sentence is what committees quote

Many readers look for an explicit statement placing the candidate against a reference group: among the strongest students taught in a decade, or the best analyst on a team of a certain size.

Such a sentence is only worth including if it is true and the group is described accurately, since an inflated comparison from a recognizable source damages the writer's future letters.

Written honestly, it gives a committee the one thing the rest of the file cannot supply: an experienced judgment about relative standing.