“The air is starting to cool. The days are getting shorter. The rain is coming back. It can only mean one thing – letter of recomendation season has returned (also, pumpkin spice everything),” according to Zachary Simmons, psychological sciences.
“Most of us have never received any formal training in how to write a letter of recommendation,” Simmons writes as this week’s Teaching and Learning Collaborative (TLC) contributor. “Rather, we have pieced together a working knowledge of how to do it based on letters we have read, people we have talked to, and a liberal dash of discipline-specific intuition. By now, we are all veterans of many of these letters, which brings with it a sense of confidence and expertise in our writing. It can also lead to complacency: turns of phrase recycled one too many times or accolades that end up sounding so rehearsed that they lose their potency.” See more with links to resources at this link.