Tips for Writing a Successful Letter of Recommendation

I'm David lombardino editor and chief of Da editors and proofers here to give you our tips for writing successful letter of recommendation now we see this question come up most often because the writers of your letters of recommendation have asked you to actually write the letter of recommendation though of course we do also get the writers themselves who have asked us to to help and so here want to cover our tips our basic guidelines for how to write successful letter of recommendation and so overall what you want to do is you want to make sure that you are concise and thorough you want to be detailed and provide specifics this is not place for general information or vague information and generally speaking you want the letter to be from the writer's point of view in other words it should communicate ideas that are only from the point of view of the writer or only items that the writer has direct knowledge of now there are some exceptions to that it could be that if some somebody's in an oversight position or overseeing position like an attending physician happen to hear from nurses or medical staff something about you then that would be okay mean if it's direct information from somebody under that person or who would be responsible for receiving information then that would be all right but otherwise what you want if even if it's an attending physician or somebody from an oversight perspective like Dean you would wish that the details in the letter would be ones that that person has witnessed directly from the from the candidate and so when you think about the structure of the letter there's few guidelines you want to follow you want to open with concise statement about the purpose of the letter one to two sentences for the introduction to State am recommending this person for this position that's it then you can either in the if you've done that only in one sentence then you can do this in second sentence or you can start second paragraph with stating who the writer is that writer's position and how that writer came to know or got to know or witnessed the candidate now lot of times that's going to require two or three sentences and so you want to go ahead and and start your second paragraph with that and it could actually just be the entire second paragraph then either in the second half of the second paragraph or new third paragraph you could go into the details of of what you want to present again being concise being thorough providing specifics that the writer has direct knowledge of and then finally you want to conclude with two sentences two sentence paragraph stating thank you for your consideration or something along those lines I'm I'm available for any further questions you may have something like that and of course when you think about the length of letter of recommendation lot of times people will come to us and they want their letter of recommendation to fit all onto one page now this is little bit of myth the reason why programs will want your letter of recommendation to be on one page is because generally letters of recommendation don't provide are are not well written they're too vague they're General They Don't Really provide significant insight into the candidate and so why would the program want to bother to read pages and pages of that they don't want to bother to read pages and pages of it they want to just get to the point recognize that it's vague or general not very interesting and move on but what they really want are thorough letters of recommendation that go beyond page now when you say Beyond page you may be wondering well just how long I've seen outstanding letters of recommendation that are six and seven pages long now that's not to say that your letters of recommendation have to be like that most likely your letter of recommendation is not going to come anywhere close but something that you might want to consider is that if you've got two letters of recommendation if you're the program and you're looking at letters of recommendation from two different candidates and you've got one letter of recommendation that's specific concise and thorough in only one page and another Le letter of recommendation that is just as specific just as concise and just as thorough but it's 2 three four five or six pages long that longer letter of recommendation is going to get more of their attention and going to put you forward as candidate hope these tips have helped we offer full range of services for letters of recommendation come check out what we have to offer at www.d editors.