Recommendations (by others)

One of the tasks I have outside the classroom is being part of the selection committee for the National Honors Society at our school. Once a year, I get to read over a number of applications from a select group of students and offer opinions on who best meets the standards of scholarship and service the NHS is meant to represent.

An interesting side to this process is that I’m given an opportunity to read recommendation letters written by other teachers. The good part of this is that several teachers not only write well, but write distinctively enough that I can hear the teacher’s voice in my head as I read. The bad part of it is when it becomes very obvious that a teacher merely modifies an existing letter for a different student.

To be fair, I am definitely not one who writes groundbreaking works of literature every time I sit down to pen a college recommendation letter, and despite my efforts to personalize each letter, there are always a few key phrases that nearly always appear with slight modifications at most. I also understand why writing letters for an in-school organization may be treated with less gravity than writing for someone outside the school.

However, if you are reusing an old letter for a new student, it is definitely a good idea to be sure you replace every instance of the old student’s name with the new student’s name.