Despite the numerous pronoun errors in the above quote, its message does speak to me as a reader of recommendation letters. I’ve read many letters that are brimming with words yet somehow vacant of content.
Consider these bloated sentences:
It is with distinct and sincere pleasure that I come to recommend this candidate for the desired opportunity.
He is an excellent student with stellar grades and one who has achieved the highest rankings.
The first example is so self-important that it’s almost silly, while the second manages to say the same thing three times but with no specifics. Unfortunately, such sentences are the norm in many recommendation letters. Readers of such letters find themselves begging for content. They want substance rather than puffery, especially in a recommendation letter, which should only have to be read once and should give us an individual snapshot of the candidate.
To help you create such a snapshot, this chapter discusses proven ways to generate content and provide examples and evidence in recommendation letters. Just as important is to consider the circumstances that influence the writing of the letter, and to provide relevant detail.
In writing an effective letter, perhaps it will help you to heed the same advice that I give to students when they’re writing a cover letter for a job—try to think of the document as an argument. You’re actually positing a premise followed by examples and evidence designed to lead the audience to a desired conclusion. Also, as in a cover letter, you’re working within an existing framework where efficiency and professionalism are expected, and where the goal is to produce a document with enough individuality that no one else could have written its particulars. Fill your letters with content accordingly.
These websites offer excellent advice on generating content in recommendation letters:
Extensive "Writing a Letter of Recommendation" guide from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
"Advice to Graduate School Recommendation Letter Writers" page from a professor at Brown University
One of the greatest challenges for many faculty writing letters of reference is how to generate effective detail. The answer to this challenge usually involves getting to know the student better, matching persuasive examples and evidence to the appropriate criteria, and understanding the common expectations readers have about detail.
Some faculty require no help from the student in preparing a letter and don’t feel they should involve the student directly, but most ask for the student’s input, using it as a way to generate detail. Some faculty even advocate that the student begin the process by drafting a letter for them to work from. Even if that particular approach doesn't suit you, some form of partnership with the student in the process can be mutually beneficial.
Common ways that faculty partner with students to generate letter detail include:
At a minimum, most faculty at least review a student’s resume to help generate detail for their letter, which also helps students to view themselves as professionals.
One example from a faculty member at North Seattle College represents the above approach perfectly. In her Process for Getting a Recommendation Letter page, this faculty member spells out her protocol to her students, attending to everything from practical materials that she needs to write the letter to reminding the student to follow up with her. Such an approach helps students to understand the process and uplifts it to something closer to an appropriately professional partnership between mentor and mentee.
Employers and committees are always interested in how you came to know and how long you have known a student, and many writers open their letters by directly stating this. Especially if you teach an upper-level course or run a lab or program, it can be effective to describe succinctly the curriculum or the exact nature of the class or work, including the types of students involved, texts studied, or goals and initiatives. Curriculum detail or a description of a student’s work community can also provide a handy segue for you to compare the student to others.
Despite the need to establish your relationship with the student, you must leave the reader with a strong impression that your ultimate connection to the student is a professional one. Beware of overstating your relationship, presenting it as too emotional or overly personal, or worse, puzzling through it right on the page.
This can be a tricky matter and it is sometimes best left alone, but subtly or directly enhancing your credibility can greatly aid a student if the circumstances warrant. For instance, if you are a professional engineer and the student also aims to be one eventually, citing your background briefly in connection with the student’s potential will certainly uplift the student. Likewise, if you’ve been teaching for thirty years and this student is among the top ten you have had in your classes, when you mention both of these facts you catapult the student in the audience’s estimation. Clearly, you do not wish to risk discussing your credentials in too much detail or for no apparent reason. Be selective and restrained, focusing principally on the student’s background and connection to yours.
When matching a student’s abilities to specific criteria, there is, of course, the danger of just lifting the criteria from a form and plugging in the student’s name alongside them: “I feel that [insert student name here] has strong analytical skills, emotional stability, maturity, and motivation.” Instead, use the language of the criteria, perhaps even by grounding your topic sentences in the diction, and apply the criteria directly to your experiences with the student. Thus: “John’s analytical skills have surfaced clearly in both his writing and his senior project.”
A letter of recommendation lives or dies on its examples and evidence. Not surprisingly, research shows that the specificity of the examples used in a letter enhances the perceived credibility of the writer, in some cases even more so than numerical data (1). Among the best ways to present concrete examples about student’s accomplishments are:
Be especially careful when using data in relation to student evaluation. Letter writers sometimes make claims such as “This student is in the top 5% of the nation’s graduates” without evidence to back it up, and thus the claim loses credibility. Also, beware of providing too much quantitative data about a student or appearing to have simply retreated to your grade book or attendance records to define a student’s academic character. Grades are good evidence, but only briefly—especially when letter readers possess the student’s transcript anyway. Emphasize virtues not apparent from a transcript.
Finally, amidst your specific examples, keep in mind that letter writers should also give attention to, as one educator puts it, “some general qualities employers would like to see in a candidate” (2). Tie your examples directly to traits and qualities that employers and grad schools seek, such as initiative, aptitude, trainability, willingness to learn, enthusiasm, leadership, self-motivation, intelligence, adaptability, imagination, and communication skills.
The following websites offer more advice about generating detail in recommendation letters:
“How to Write the Perfect Reference Letter" page from writexpress.com
Besides being specific to the student being recommended in a letter, one of the most persuasive tactics you can use is to provide detail tailored to the student’s field of study. Assuming an audience that shares specialized knowledge, you can better inform the audience about a candidate by selectively showcasing anything from a poem written by the student to a technique that the student mastered in your lab. Also, an awareness and articulation of the attributes most valued in a particular field of study will help improve a candidate’s chances.
What follows are some ideas for providing content specific to a field of study. Although it certainly can be argued that it’s impossible to limit these list members to one particular field, I’ve populated this list based on some commonly accepted skills and experiences expected within these fields. A considered, targeted letter in each of these fields would attend carefully to most or all of these list members.
For more advice on providing content in recommendation letters based on field of study, visit this site:
As writers, we don’t always have ready words for every circumstance. When writing letters, special circumstances frequently arise and we may desire to make commentary beyond the usual. Just a few of the common special circumstances, with brief examples of how some writers handled them, are discussed below.
Since your recommendation letter is almost always read outside of your school, there are cases where you should define briefly any terms specific to your school, the name and role of a group, or even terms that might be unfamiliar to your audience. At my undergraduate program—Juniata College in PA—the term “program of emphasis” rather than “major” is still used, and explaining the distinction, noting that the program of emphasis allows students to design a major course of study to suit their needs, might be necessary in a letter endorsing the student’s course choices. At Harvard, the term “tutor” could mean a small seminar instructor, a thesis supervisor, or an academic dormitory supervisor (3).
Also, be sure to write out the names for a relevant course you teach that might otherwise sound like an alphabet soup. “OPMGT 418W” might mean little to an outside reader, but a description of the course as a capstone writing-intensive class in operations management educates letter readers about the course’s contribution to the student’s credentials.
Especially if you’d like to discuss a student’s inconsistent academic record—which is sometimes better done by the faculty member than by the student—straightforwardness and a movement towards positive endorsement can be very effective. Such commentary usually only comes after a frank discussion with the student, of course, in which you specifically ask permission to discuss the student’s grades so that you may give context to them. One such commentary in a recommendation letter follows:
In his high school, John did not have the sufficient background needed to prepare him for the rigors of college. His transition to Mythic University was not an easy one. In fact, in his first math course and chemistry lab, he received a D and a C, respectively. However, this did not send him fleeing to a major that he perceived would be easier; instead, his resolve was strengthened. He has since sought out tutorial resources to assist him and is now showing steady improvement in his grades, having just earned his first B+ in a college chemistry course and a 2.9 GPA for the most recent semester. Although John does not present the credentials of a scholar, his intent, passion, and motivation are genuine, and his progress is measurable.
For students under-represented in a field, the social and academic challenges can be both specific and subtle, a fact honored by scholarships sometimes earmarked for these students. The paragraph that follows—authored by the school’s Diversity Officer, which helps to lend it authority—is excerpted from a letter used to recommend a student for a minority scholarship in her field.
In the fields of science and engineering, students of color and thus professionals of color remain under-represented. This under-representation can result in a lack of faculty role models, peers of color in the classroom and laboratory, and often in an isolation that inhibits full participation in the university community. Despite these difficulties, however, some students strive and thrive as Janet Lerner has done. The commitment and scholarship of a student such as Janet must be celebrated.
In the case that follows, the faculty member agreed to write a letter despite limited knowledge of the student, and revealed this in the opening paragraph.
I have only worked with John Lerner for one semester, in that he was originally brought into our program two years ago by my predecessor, who is currently the Director of Academic Advising in another program at Mythic University. When I contacted her for her evaluation of John, she was swift and overwhelmingly positive in her response, stating that “He is a diligent and memorable student committed to scholarship.” She went on to say that she felt great reward and satisfaction in John’s growing accomplishments.
As promoted strongly in Chapter 1 of this manual, faculty can effectively recommend students even while acknowledging areas where growth is needed. An example follows:
One way for me to comment on Janet’s maturity, motivation, and performance in my class is to discuss her final paper, a proposal arguing for the creation of a new school district in her local area. Using maps, basic spatial analysis, and newspaper articles local to her area, Janet wrote a mock proposal to a school board that was professional and truly worthy of the board's attention. Her paper went far beyond the scope of the assignment, and also reflected something I noted throughout the semester: her natural ability with language. Janet has a creative, confident, maturing voice as a writer. Although she did not receive an A in my course because her grades were not consistently high, her last two papers and some one-on-one meetings with her persuaded me that she can become an effective contributor to her chosen field of sociology.
In the example below, when asked to write a recommendation letter for a student three years after he had graduated, the faculty member solicited the student’s input and was able to write an updated letter based on the documentation provided, rehearsing and connecting the student’s undergraduate record to his present path.
John has always been an academic standout. As I consider the types of academic projects in which John involved himself as an undergraduate—from his work in a sediment sampling lab to his active participation in a upper-level class in which he performed a field study of sea grass health—I am genuinely impressed by his drive, motivation, and the clarity of his vision for the future. The fact that John also won a prestigious Udall Scholarship (a national competition for students in the sciences) and received numerous other academic awards underscores his excellent undergraduate record. Since John has been in graduate school over the past three years, he has communicated with me once a year via e-mail, articulating clear professional goals in relation to his research on Southern New England salt marshes, discussing his presentation to the CT Coastal Audubon Society’s Open Space Inventory Steering Committee, and emphasizing his vision to work in estuary research and policy.
These websites offer detailed advice about how to handle special circumstances when writing letters of recommendation:
“Write a Recommendation Letter" article from Career Services at Tufts University
It is surprising how much irrelevant detail some letters of recommendation include, and just how much this can hurt the candidate. Consider this excerpt from a letter written in the medical field (4), in which the letter author goes into an inappropriate level of detail about a candidate’s medical problems:
Her last years in my laboratory were impacted by serious health problems that have fortunately gone away—she had really debilitating problems with a herniated disk that apparently was a paraneoplastic phenomenon that went away once an early carcinoma of the left ovary was identified and removed.
Here the detail is not just absurdly clinical in context, but discriminatory and potentially damaging. A generous reader might interpret that the writer is well-meaning—intending to explain, perhaps, a long number of years in a lab or a weak publication record—but many would interpret that the writer actually intends to do harm. Whatever the case here, clearly the detail presented is highly irrelevant. Several studies suggest that letters often reveal more about the idiosyncrasies of the writer than the characteristics of the applicant (5,6,7), and that letter readers certainly do attend to irrelevancies when reading, in some cases over-relying on them when making decisions (8). These irrelevancies might be about either the letter writer or candidate, and either way harm can be done. When writing letters, avoid providing details that are unimportant to the selection process and may only distract or puzzle the audience. Common irrelevancies in letters include commentary about the student’s personal life or health, digressive discussions of ideology, events, or research beyond the audience’s needs, vague examples or claims that simply go unexplained, or a focus on the letter writer’s personality or beliefs that ultimately doesn't matter to the reader anyway.
(1) Knouse, Stephen B. 1983. The Letter of Recommendation: Specificity and Favorability of Information, in Personnel Psychology. 36, 331-341.
(2) Kasambria, K. Paul. 1984. "Recommendation Inflation," in Teacher Educator, 20(2), 26-29.
(3) Graham, Fan Chung. “Policy for Writing Recommendation Letters for Undergraduate Students. Formerly available at http://math.ucsd.edu. accessed May 18, 2010.