Hi Professors,
At this time of year, you may be starting to receive requests from your students to write letters of recommendation for them. Here’s a question for you. Did you ever receive formal training on how to write effective recommendation letters when you were in graduate school or as a new faculty member?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your answer is “No.” I personally never received any guidance, training, or feedback on how to write a letter of recommendation. But yet it’s something that I had to do every single year as a faculty member.
I never quantified how many I wrote during my time in higher ed, but my guess is that it would number in the 100s. This is a modest number compared to prominent senior scholars that I know, who are asked to write several 100 letters per year!
Given the ubiquity of recommendation letters in graduate school admissions processes, fellowship applications, job searches, and promotion cases—particularly in North America, it’s pretty wild that there isn’t more attention paid to this genre of writing.
Why is it that faculty receive such little training on how to craft letters of recommendation? Especially when these letters can have a critical impact in an evaluation process?
Understanding the Work That Goes into Writing Recommendation Letters
To start off, this podcast topic made me think of everyone who has written me a letter of recommendation in the past. I just want to extend my sincere gratitude to anyone who has taken the time to write for me, and a very special thank you to my doctoral advisor, who wrote several dozens of letters for me during my time as a graduate student and later as a faculty member.
Many of the letters from my mentors proved to be key at various stages of my academic career—from gaining admission into graduate school, receiving fellowships for my research, landing campus interviews for my faculty positions, and later, obtaining tenure. I’m sure that some of these endorsements were invaluable and may have helped to tip the balance in having my application move from a long list to a short list, for instance.
I never really understood how much time and care were involved in writing a good letter of recommendation, until I started to regularly write them myself. Letters of recommendation, also called reference letters or LOR (and no, that’s not Lord of the Rings!)…this was not a genre of writing that I could dash off like an e-mail. For some letters—especially ones that I was writing for the first time for advisees or peers—I could spend 2-3 hours on drafting and revising the document.
Part of that time also included reviewing seminar papers, research statements, publications, and CVs in order to write an informed and detailed recommendation for a student. I put in the time and effort into crafting a strong letter for my advisees because I wanted to give my students the best chance at their applications.
And I knew that I had benefited from the work and labor of my mentors endorsing me. It’s a way of paying it forward in the academy. As this practical guide published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute states:
“As a mentor, you have an obligation to support students and postdocs in their job search and to help them find a good match for their abilities and aspirations. If they ask you to write a recommendation letter, it is customary to support them in this way.”
This is a type of professional work that we do all the time, but it’s largely shrouded from public view. In a new book called Writing Recommendation Letters: The Discourse of Evaluation in Academic Settings, authors Mohammed Albakry and Clint Bryan explain that the recommendation letter can be considered as an occluded support genre or a “behind-the-scenes” institutional genre.
Because this formal genre of writing is confidential and the letter requester often waives the right to access it, the letter will be read only by a select group of individuals—like an admissions committee, a search committee, or an administrator.
As Albakry and Bryan point out, graduate students often receive help in developing CVs and cover letters in professional development workshops. But very rarely are they advised on how to read and write thoughtful and informative recommendation letters.
I think there is so much that can be explored on this topic, like
• how something so occluded is built into the bedrock of higher ed hiring, admissions, and granting processes.
• how a well-crafted letter by a respected and influential scholar can launch a candidate’s application.
• on the flip side, how a poorly written letter by an influential scholar can have the opposite effect.
• how higher ed operates on a reputational economy.
• how different academic cultures approach this genre in drastic ways. For instance, the cultures of writing more effusively vs. writing more bluntly for the candidate.
• how gendered and/or racialized bias can be folded into letters.
• the question of whether recommendations are essential.
But I think that’s going to have to be another podcast episode!
So, let’s focus on letters for students today. If you’re a newer faculty member, and you’re just now starting to receive requests to write these letters for your students, what are some things to keep in mind? Here are 8 tips that you may want to consider.
8 Tips to Consider When Writing Letters of Recommendation Your First Time
1. The longer you serve in your academic position, you will start to be the intended reader for these letters. You could be conducting a review of the applications for admission into your graduate program. You’ll begin to see, on a regular basis, the kinds of documents that come in—from advisors who really go to bat for their students to ones who bunt at best.
You’ll start to take mental notes of these LORs, their traits, and eventually develop your own approach and style.
2. Often times there will be prompts in the application that ask for specific information in a letter: the length of time that you’ve known the applicant, the capacity in which you know the applicant, and your assessment of the candidate’s scholarly achievements and potential. You can certainly follow these prompts to draft your document, which is typically 2 pages long, single-spaced [for graduate students].
3. There are resources and samples that you can consult. You can consider checking out the aforementioned book by Mohammed Albakry and Clint Bryan, which was published earlier this year.
The authors analyze close to 1000 recommendation letters, and illuminate the linguistic features, rhetorical conventions, and discursive strategies of this genre. They also cover the different types of letters that you may be asked to write, as well as the standard elements in a formal letter.
4. I’ve always found it helpful to meet with students who are seeking to apply for graduate programs or fellowships. From that conversation, I can learn a lot more about their research, their goals, and their aspirations. I also request that students send me their updated CV, their statement of purpose, and the application guidelines, which is pretty standard. But I also ask them to send me an e-mail reminder one week before the deadline.
5. Some professors decide to include a policy statement on their website or on their syllabus. In large undergraduate survey courses, for instance, it is difficult for professors to get to know their students individually.
Some professors state that they will only consider writing a letter if [students have] received a certain letter grade and taken 2 courses with them. Or, the policy could state that any request must be submitted at least a month in advance of the deadline. You can decide what you want to put in your policy statement.
6. There may be cases where you have to decline a request due to not knowing a student’s work very well. It’s best to just tell the truth and say that you can’t write because you wouldn’t be able provide a strong letter for their application. That gives them the time to seek out another letter writer.
7. If you serve first-generation students or students who are not familiar with some of the etiquette surrounding asking a professor for a reference, you can have a discussion in class or mention some of your expectations for them in an e-mail or on your course website.
8. Different kinds of applications require different emphases in the letters. You can review the application guidelines, but you can also ask your students for what kinds of things they’d hope would be highlighted in the letter. Although you may have a solid research-oriented letter for a graduate student to apply for a fellowship, that same letter would need to be tailored for an application for a teaching position.
In one episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, guest Kelly Hogan explains that she gives her students instructions on how to request recommendation letters and includes a form for them to fill out. I’ll include a link to that in the transcript for this episode.
So, I hope that some of these tips are helpful if you are new to this practice. Keep in mind that the first letter for a student is the one that usually takes the most amount of time. After that, it becomes a lot easier to update or tweak certain details.
As you advance in the academy, you will not only be expected to write letters for your students, but also junior faculty and your peers. And letters for tenure cases are another subgenre entirely.
So what strategies have you gained in your many years of service? If you are a seasoned pro, I’d love to hear what your own practices and strategies include. Feel free to write to me at Katherine at RisewithClarity.com
And if you think this episode can be helpful to a new faculty member, please feel free to share this with them!
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Additional Resources
Book:
Writing Recommendation Letters: The Discourse of Evaluation in Academic Settings by Mohammed Albakry and Clint Bryan
Online resources:
Writing a Letter of Recommendation (Addendum) by Laura Bonetta
How to Write a Letter of Recommendation by Karen Kelsky
Guidelines for Writing Letters of Recommendation by ADVANCE (University of Michigan)
Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Recommendation Letters by Georgetown University, Center for Research and Fellowships
Podcast
“Inclusified Teaching Evaluation” with guests Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan on the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast
Opinion pieces:
“Are Letters of Recommendation Necessary?” by University of Venus in Inside Higher Ed
“No More Letters of Recommendation” by Benjamin Schreier in The Chronicle of Higher Education
