How to Write a Good Letter of Recommendation?

When requesting recommendation letter from Professors, it’s quite common nowadays you will be asked to provide a timeline, a work summary, or even a draft of your letter. Professors are all busy (you may fail to imagine how many emails they need to reply in a day), so it’s a reasonable request. Besides, this is actually a good news, since you could handle the content of recommendation letter by yourself. Therefore, you need to learn how to write a good recommendation letter, even as a student. Here I collected several sources and notes from them, hope they could be helpful.

By Michael Ernst (mernst@cs.washington.edu)

Below are advice from Citation: Ernst 2002 Ernst, M.(2002). Writing letters of recommendation.Retrieved from https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/advice/write-recommendation.html :

At the beginning of the letter, say how well you know the person, for how long, and how you became acquainted. Also give an overview or summary of your recommendation.

1. Be specific.

Don't just praise the person with generalities (such as “quick learner”), but give specific stories or anecdotes about things the person did to give you that impression. A letter that praises a person without being concrete comes across as a tepid recommendation. Rankings in class are another example of a helpful specific.

2. Differentiate.

Say how this person is unlike other people: his or her specific strengths.

3. Compare.

When writing to someone who shares context with you, name names. (“In the top 5% of the class” is OK, but much better is “Equivalent in promise to my former students Donny Knuth and Al Turing, but a notch below Johnny von Neumann.”)

4. Be plausible.

Don't make the person out to be perfect. Often a letter just ignores shortcomings, but then the letter lacks credibility; writing such letters will hurt people you recommend in the future. If the person has shortcomings, admit them or note some ways the person can improve, particularly if the person has started to overcome those problems. Don't make up faults nor magnify real ones.

5. State your own qualifications.

How many other people have you seen who are of the caliber expected by the reader? (For a recommedation to a top-10 school such as UW, the recommendation will carry more weight if the recommender has spent time at a top-10 school. Only someone with first-hand experience can give a truly accurate assessment.) These qualifications are probably best-suited to a postscript, though sometimes they are written as the first paragraph to establish credibility.

6. Justify your recommendations.

Don't write a statement like "The applicant is definitely qualified for your institution/award/program" (especially with "your institution" verbatim as in a form letter, not substituted by an actual name). This weakens rather than strengthens the letter, because the reader will assume that the form letter was sent to many places, and the statement cannot be true of every recipient.

7. Don’t be too brief.

One paragraph, or two short paragraphs, is the kiss of death. (If you don't know the student well, and don't have much to say, add a short paragraph explaining what the course is and why it's good that the student excelled in it. This won't fool most people, but will soften the blow of a short letter.) However, don't ramble: make it succinct and to the point. Whoever reads your letter is probably reading hundreds of other letters. If the key points of yours do not pop out, or the reader wearies midway through your letter, then your letter will net be effective.

8. Get feedback.

For situations where the letter has a disproportionate impact (e.g., for faculty applications), or if you are new to recommendation-writing, treat your letter like any other important piece of writing: get feedback from others.

9. PDF format.

If you are requested to provide a letter in PDF, provide the original PDF that was created by your word processor or typesetting program. 1. Don't scan the document, which degrades the visual quality and makes it much harder to read. No one really cares whether your original signature is on the letter, so you can insert a scanned signature into the PDF or even use a typewritten signature. You don't want eyestrain (or anything else) to lessen the impact of your letter. 2. For similar reasons, don't use "watermark" letterhead that puts a large, dim image (for example, of your university crest or logo) behind your text. You may think this looks cool and sets your letter or institution apart, but in fact it makes your letter harder to read without impressing anyone.

Mayfield Handbook: Writing Letters of Recommendation

In the page of Citation: Ernst 2002 Ernst, M.(2002). Writing letters of recommendation.Retrieved from https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/advice/write-recommendation.html , it also mentions:

Before writing the letter

• In most cases, agree to write a letter of recommendation only if you can honestly write a supportive letter. If you cannot portray an individual positively, decline to write the recommendation.
• Ask for a current resume and as complete a description as possible of the position or program to which the person is applying.
• Assemble and review all other relevant information you may have about the person you are recommending. It is often easy to overlook some important accomplishment.

Writing the letter

• Present the person truthfully but positively. A recommendation that paints an unrealistic picture of a candidate may be discounted. A recommendation that focuses on negative qualities may do more harm than intended.
• Tailor the recommendation to the position. A letter recommending an individual for a job as a camp counselor should contain different information from that in a letter recommending the same individual for a job as a computer programmer.
• Begin the letter by describing how you know the individual you are recommending and the specific contexts upon which you are basing your evaluation.
  • In what situations have you known the individual?
  • For how long?
  • How closely?
• Present the individual’s general qualities relevant to the position along with one or two detailed examples. Including vivid detail will make the recommendation much more effective.

By Fadel Adib at MIT

Below are advice from Citation: Adib 2021 Adib, F.(2021). Letters of recommendation play a big role in the review process. X (formerly Twitter).Retrieved from https://x.com/fadeladib/status/1465354271994494976 :

There’s GPA, awards, SOP & maybe papers. But for me (& many colleagues), a single great letter >> everything else. Interestingly, 1 bad letter doesn't negatively impact a student's chances as much.

Why am I sharing this? I often see letters that are very short, e.g., “I highly recommend this student without reservation”. When writing such letters, writers often have very good intentions & think very highly of the applicant. But, such letters almost never help. Here’s why:

Most of the time, reviewers don’t know the letter writers (a good thing), which means that we might not understand what reservations they might have. We also don’t know where they’re coming from, so it's important to reference and qualify.

In my experience, the best letters are those that: a) give a background of who the reference writer is, b) go into depth into their interactions with the applicant, c) tell us how they view them in comparison to their peers.

Here’s a little bit more on "c" specifically: People often criticize the question of “how does this student rank with respect to their peers”. I used to criticize it, too, but have come to understand its importance over the years. Say you’re a reviewer, and you already know the school and the letter writers and the GPA system and how people from that school have fared before in grad school here: then that question doesn’t matter as much. Why? Because you're already calibrated to that school => know how to assess the application. But, say you have an applicant from a school you’re not familiar with (one of the 25,000 in the world). Then, even a perfect GPA and all positive but short references give very little info.

Some might assume that an interview can fill in the gap. But interviews are known to amplify certain biases, and people with a stronger command of language will give much stronger impressions. This is why letters matter a lot.

What’s an ideal letter example? In my view, it starts by saying: “I strongly recommend [person] to your graduate program. I have known them for N months/yrs in my capacity as research supervisor. I have worked with them closely & observed them. They are smart/diligent/kind/... I am a researcher/prof/eng in [institution] & have supervised N students over the past N years. I believe [person] is highly qualified for your program: for reference, I consider their potential to be similar to multiple applicants (can put names) whom I've observed and ... have been admitted to grad school at MIT/other schools & have done extremely well.

A natural question is: what if none of the supervisees have gone on to those types of schools? Then, it’s even more important to quantify the reference, for example: "This applicant is on top of his batch in our program, which is the most challenging in the country/region. I consider them to be the best student I have supervised in the past N years in terms of research ability/passion/diligence."

Afterwards, an ideal letter would invest about 2 paragraphs (or more) going into details of about observation of the applicant. Then go into what they did, for example: “I first came to know [applicant name] when they approached me to do research on topic Y, which I work on.” then writers can add some information on how they made the decision to give the student the opportunity to work with them.The student worked on problem X. This problem is important because... Prior to them, another student / I had made [this progress]. When the applicant started doing research with us, I expected they would do Z. I was pleasantly surprised that ...”

Ideally, at this point, the letter would add more information on how the reference writer observed their work, why they were impressed, and why the outcome is important (e.g., used in production, led to a paper that is being submitted, etc.).

Afterwards, end the letter with a short paragraph and a final assessment, reminding the committee why the student should be admitted.

By Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University

Citation: Krishnamurthi 2008 Krishnamurthi, S.(2008). Advice to Graduate School Recommendation Letter Writers.Retrieved from https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Memos/Grad-School-Recos/ wrote a tutorial more from a teacher’s perspective. In section “Ask Your Student for Help”, Krishnamurthi suggests:

I tell my students to give me a list of everything about them that they think is relevant. I explicitly tell them to brag (some students are shy and may not give themselves enough credit otherwise): filtering their input is my job, not theirs, and I say so. Sometimes I do get items that are over-the-top, but no harm done. Much more often a student will remind me of something they did that I had forgotten, but was well worth remembering.

References