Faculty and staff write huge numbers of letters of recommendation and character evaluations every semester. They can feel overwhelming and the sheer importance of these letters sometimes can feel daunting.
On April 15, 2025, the National Association of Fellowships Advisors (NAFA) hosted a comprehensive workshop focused on the critical role letters of recommendation play in shaping our students’ opportunities. Featuring scholarship leaders from prestigious organizations including the Rhodes Scholarship, Critical Language Scholarship, and Pat Tillman Foundation, alongside leading academic researchers, the workshop highlighted both the power and pitfalls inherent in recommendation practices.
The NAFA workshop emphasized several strategic recommendations:
- Letters should clearly contextualize the student’s current stage (early, developing, advanced) to help selection committees interpret achievements accurately.
- Authentic personal knowledge of a student’s strengths significantly outweighs prestige or rank of the letter writer.
- Avoid hedging language that diminishes the candidate’s profile unless genuinely needed to contextualize resilience or growth.
- Institutions can support faculty and staff through facilitated discussions about letter writing. In short, few of us have opportunities to talk about how we can become better at writing these things.
Letters of recommendation are essential in determining student success across fellowships, scholarships, internships, and graduate placements. They serve as influential narratives offering evaluators nuanced perspectives on a student’s academic maturity, skills, character, and potential. However, despite our best intentions, letters can fail to tell the story we want to tell, and even sometimes privilege already advantaged students through language choices, content emphasis, and letter length.
While there probably is no one size fits all approach, it is possible to remind ourselves of how these letters work as a genre.
General Guidance Checklist for Faculty Letter-Writers:
- Clarify Purpose: Confirm the precise purpose of the letter and why the student has chosen you. If the student does not have a clear idea, it is important to emphasize relationship building with them.
- Gather Concrete Examples: Request detailed examples from the student to strengthen the letter’s specificity. If you do not know some details, its important to talk with the student about how this situation can change. Remember that these examples should also help the reader understand why the student is right for this opportunity.
- Personalize and Humanize: Craft a compelling narrative that vividly illustrates the student’s unique qualities and contributions. Think of a letter as telling a story. It should certainly explain your experience and position to judge their accomplishments.
- Balance Enthusiasm with Specificity: Ensure enthusiasm is consistently backed by concrete, illustrative examples.
- Maintain Genre Awareness: Adhere to expected rhetorical conventions appropriate to academia and professional contexts. Letters in the United States tend to glow, especially for top students. Being glowing is thus not going to set your letter apart. If you really do glow, show it by talking in terms of details, concrete examples, and why the student is right for this opportunity.
- Be Open to Feedback: Expect and embrace iterative revisions based on institutional or external feedback. Some scholarships require the university to follow a nomination process. Goldwater, for example, does this. If we use an internal nomination process, then that gives us time to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of letters in order to make them stronger.
- Recognize Your Limits: Clearly communicate if you are unable to write a strong, supportive letter. Be gentle, however, and offer the student guidance on how your letter could potentially become stronger over time.
Our thoughtful recommendation letters profoundly impact our students’ futures and also the prestige of our university. If you’d like me to hold a roundtable so we can talk about these things together, please let me know. If I get five requests, I’ll organize it. Stephen Casper (scasper@clarkson.edu)
References and Key Sources cited by NAFA.
- Cook, M. (2022). Inside Higher Ed.
- Houser, C. & Lemmons, K. (2018). Journal of Further & Higher Education.
- Salgado, C. (2021). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
- Schall, J. (2005). Writing Recommendation Letters: A Faculty Handbook.
- Schmader, T. et al. (2007). Sex Roles.
- Trix, F. & Psenka, C. (2003). Discourse and Society.
- Tuckley, L. et al. (2024). Written Communication.
- Warrick, P. et al. (2019). Bridging the Gap.