Letters of Recommendation Editing and Proofreading Services

A letter says the student was hardworking, reliable, always punctual, and a pleasure to teach. The committee has read four hundred of these and knows exactly what it means: the writer could not think of anything to say. The student may be outstanding. The letter has quietly ended their application, and nobody involved intended that.

We edit letters of recommendation and the material around them — academic and employment references, letters for graduate, professional and fellowship applications, promotion and tenure letters, the briefs applicants give their referees, and the requests referees receive when they need more to work with. Our editors work on a letter whose weaknesses are invisible to the person writing it.

The comparative and specific content is what makes a reference count, and its failure is warmth without evidence. A letter that says only pleasant things is read as a refusal to say more. We work through these so the writer's basis for judgement is established first — how long, in what capacity, how many comparable people they have taught or managed — since a reader weighs everything after that by it; so at least one comparative statement appears, of the form "in the top two of roughly forty students I have supervised in eleven years", because a ranking against a stated population is the single most useful sentence a reference can contain; so one incident is described at length, given that committees remember specifics and discard adjectives, and the incident is chosen for what it demonstrates rather than for how well it reflects on the writer; so the qualities named are the ones the reader is assessing, which means reading the criteria before writing; so any reservation is stated plainly and in proportion, since a letter with no reservation at all is discounted and a small honest one makes the praise believable; so the terms that signal faint praise are removed — reliable, punctual, enthusiastic, pleasant — as these are the vocabulary of a writer with nothing to report; so the letter says what the writer expects the candidate to do next, because that is a prediction and predictions carry weight; and so the applicant supplies the writer with the criteria, the deadline and a factual reminder of what they did. Letters written this way move applications forward.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including references, the identities of candidates and any reservation expressed. We are editors rather than referees, committees or advisers, and we offer no view on any candidate, letter or decision. What we can do is turn goodwill into evidence.