How to Write a Letter of Recommendation

Sometimes, academics can learn a lesson from business. Think "blurb" when you want to sell that student to an employer or program.

By George Felton

Letters of recommendation for students are never easy to write. All faculty feel charged with telling the truth, but we also feel compelled to go over the top far enough that our student won't seem damned with faint praise. And, as with grade point averages, the top gets higher every year. Is it possible to write too positive a letter anymore? No, it is not.

Yet traditional language has lost its lift. If we say that a student is "good," then obviously that student is not "great," and we will have just tossed him on the dung heap of the unexceptional. But if we write "great," then we invite the thought, how great? Is she greater than any student in the last year? Than any student in the last century? Than simply the kid beside her in class? What? So we ratchet up: "remarkable"—but in what ways exactly?

If you're like I was, you find yourself climbing the ladder of hyperbole but never getting anywhere, except depressed. You love your students and want to send them happily and meritoriously on their way, but they are, alas, often far from perfect. Because a once-reasonable recommendation is now an unreasonable insult, the question is how to write improbable praise that tells the truth in a way you can live with.

One word, my friends: blurbs. What sells books can sell students, and, with a little care, hyperbole and your conscience can coexist. In the hot air that has become the letter of recommendation, either we learn to ride the thermals or we drop from the sky faster than a midlist first novel with no marketing budget, yanking our students down with us. Time to study up.

Say what cannot be.

Nothing hooks harder than paradox. The Los Angeles Times Book Review teases with this conclusion about Brad Watson's The Heaven of Mercury: "Extraordinary . . . mixes whimsy and hard truth in a way that's heartbreaking." The Philadelphia Inquirer offers up these contradictions on Marie Arana's American Chica: "Close and distant, ironic and passionate, deeply spiritual and down-right funny." Learn to wield the poleaxing power of the improbable combination. Are you faced with writing a recommendation for a tossle-capped, sweetly blank bonehead of a guy, a fellow so academically unexceptional that extravagant praise seems all but impossible? Simply put the pretzel logic of paradox into play. Pick a word for him, almost any word, then pair it with its opposite. "Dense" suggests "airy;" "solid" begets "transparent;" "chronic" implies "acute." Thus, "Justin [Jason, Jared, Josh] is a student both dense and airy, solid yet transparent, a prescholar whose urge to relate Yeats to Limp Bizkit is at once chronic and acute. He'll begin as a simple mystery but blossom into a joyous befuddlement." Bingo. Your young man is unexceptional no more.

Invoke body blows.

The best book blurbs turn reading into a contact sport. We're not just plopping our butt in a chair; we're wrestling life itself around the room. Because your readers will be expecting the usual academic cud chewing, hem hawing, and weed whacking, slip in some body blows. Sucker punch the committee. What to say on behalf of that smart but prickly student, the one who takes criticism poorly and argues with classmates? It sounds to me like "he's pulsing with intrigue, a fellow as talented as he is harrowing. Fearless. Intense. Immediate. A stunner. He brings a brawling, bare-knuckle bravura to the room." This description will raise both eyebrows and neck hair. In a stack of several hundred sound-alike applicants, yours just got noticed.

Leave no adjective unattended.

Blurbers are great at these twofers, sticking adverbs in front of adjectives to give them a goose: "euphorically successful," "admirably fearless," "zestfully imagined." And they often devise oxymoronic pairs—"wonderfully disturbing," "savagely playful"—to suggest that we're about to be whipsawed into a new awareness. Take, for example, reviewer Michael Chabon's trifecta for Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones: "Painfully funny, bracingly tough, terribly sad."

Now even if your worst student asks for a recommendation, you can heartily agree, since no bad behavior need be left behind. Why tiptoe past spotty grades? Call them "exhilaratingly panoramic" and mean it. If a student's excessive absence (a "refreshingly brave approach" to class, don't you think?) has forced you to give her a B+, call your failure to make it an A "inescapably poignant." Does he refuse to take advice? Celebrate his "gloriously impervious sensibility." Is another student adept at slipping into class late, finding a warm spot in the back row, then nodding off? Admire, as I do, his "seamlessly nuanced vacuity."

Reinvigorate clichés.

One beauty of raiding someone else's language system is that all things old are new again. Clichés in the book-review business become news in the student-review business. "Taut and spare prose" we've heard too often. But "taut and spare research assistant"? I don't think so. If you're trying to get a grade-grinding student into graduate school, what phrase could work harder? Who isn't looking for tireless, low-cost mules too self-obsessed to unionize but compulsive enough for the long march, not just to the doctorate but, more important, to grateful acknowledgment in their professors' publications? Anyone coming across your phrase in advance of an interview will approach this prospect with widened eyes. You've increased your readability and put your recommendee on the radar. Good for you, and good for your student.

Book-blurb clichés ripe for repurposing hang pendulous all around. Say of a student's shaky, roller-coaster transcript, "What a read, what a ride!" Of the student who monopolizes class time with endless rambling, write, "A marvel, there's so much to relish here. Savory. Irreplaceable. Anecdotal. Witty, wonderfully informative." About the student who's hostile and apparently off his medication: "Hard to put down, even harder to forget. Disturbing in the best sense of the word." For the class clown: "A terrific entertainment. This kid goes down like a shot of moonshine, hot and clean. A big-hearted, evil genius, he works a room like the love child of Groucho Marx, Madonna, and F. Murray Abraham."

And forgive yourself while you're at it.

You meant to get to know them all, really you did. But the boys ride so low in their chairs—and pull bandanas, doo rags, and ball caps so low on their heads—that you never get a good look at half of them. Now that Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez, and the rest have sanctioned public near-nudity, the girls often wear so little that you wouldn't look their way on a dare. As a consequence, you hardly know who's in the room anymore. And with your midlife deafness kicking in, the kids aren't answering your questions, they're murmuring about them. As you get fuzzier, so do your students. Viewed from a greater distance every year, they begin to blur: Bria, Brianne, Brittney? Who can say?

But why should your failures become their problem? After all, they're seniors now, they're inventory, and it's clearance time at your college. As last semester's student reviews make clear, they've forgiven you. Time to forgive them. Take your cue from Samuel Johnson, who once said, "Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement," and who auctioned off a brewery with: "We are not here to sell boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." Well, you and I aren't, of course, but many of the kids are, and so are their employers. Give them what they're yearning for. Besides, those answers you can't hear might just be "truisms of stunningly exceptional competence," banalities "brimming with authority, eccentricity, and grisly detail." I think it's high time you said so.

George Felton is professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design.
     

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