I wrote recently about the importance of letters as a form of evidence for historians. Letters allow for someone to decide reflectively what to say and how to say it their particular audience. There is a time delay that forces a bit more narrative. Of course, letters make assumptions about what the recipient knows and as a scholar I wish more of the people writing these letters would talk about their topics in more detail. Still, they require the writer to explain their ideas and then wrap them up in a finite space. We have precious few of those today—except for a form of writing that will be very familiar to teachers at all levels of schooling, and certain other kinds of professionals: the letter of recommendation.
Letter-writing between friends may have dropped off precipitously since email and texting became more common ways of communicating, but I write dozens of letters of recommendation each year. I don’t know what happens to these letters, and while I’m sure many people don’t see them as acts of originality or creativity, the best letters of recommendation will have specificity and be making an argument about a particular human being. They usually describe that person’s personality, character traits, achievements, ability to get along with others—and if they are good letters of recommendation, they will have examples of each of those. It’s possible more and more folks are relying on AI for this and the generic letter is always out there, but the good ones will do more than that.
I like to think I’m very good at writing letters of recommendation. My student getting good jobs or internships or getting into an appropriate graduate school seem to be the evidence of this. And yes, I use repetitive language in many sections of my letters as I let the evaluators know about my institution, department, and personal experience and expertise. But then, I have to say some particular things about a particular person. And I enjoy people and am an extrovert, so perhaps it comes easily to me, but I like telling stories about the amazing young people who I get to mentor.
A coda here: A good letter of recommendation is also honest. Over the years I’ve begun telling students or others asking for LORs what exactly it is I will be able to say and what I won’t be able to say. I don’t know if they always understand what I’m doing, but if I can talk about their work ethic and their reliability but not their stellar writing or critical thinking, I try to make that clear. So the people on the other side of the letter can interpret it in the way that they want to. Sometimes reliability and work ethic and emotional stability are more important than being an excellent communicator in writing.
A good letter of recommendation also looks out for what the institution/organization or job is that the student (or other person) is applying for. So I have to be specific about the traits of the place that they are applying. Sometimes I can say more about this than at other times, but making that connection is really helpful—is this a good place for this person and why? This also requires some narrative and saying “out loud” what it is about the organization or the kind of work that makes it a good fit for the candidate.
So, as we learned in high school about letter writing back in the 1980s, there are definitely forms and styles to follow in a good letter of recommendation, and there are templates one can follow, but it is in the “meat” of the letter, the experience and traits of the subject, that provide the good stuff, the narrative. And many online reference forms don’t require a “letter” format any more—just ticking boxes or numbers on a scale. And perhaps all of that will one day replace my letters with their paragraphs and (hopefully) coherent sentences.
But in the meantime, I think letters of recommendation could be a great form of scholarly evidence someday I have found myself reading historical evidence that I recognize now ar the antecedents of the letter of recommendation. A few years ago I wrote a biography of a director of a medical school in the early twentieth century—and a great deal of his correspondence was essentially letters of recommendation. He didn’t write them in the way we do now, but as he was writing to hospital administrators around the world, he would include paragraphs about young graduates who he thought they should hire. He included wildly inappropriate information about their marriage life, hobbies, and who they got along with in med school, but therein lies the juicy information that historians love to know. The nuns and priests of the seventeenth century who I am currently researching also wrote letters that were basically letters of recommendation for their students. The subjects of these letters aren’t often people who end up with lots of power and status and may not have their own archive, but they are mentioned in the archives of these institutions.
I don’t know where all the letters of recommendation go. Do institutions destroy them? Where would future historians find them (once the laws of privacy no longer apply, of course!). As someone who keeps copies of all my letters of recommendation in the cloud, I know that if I save these, in one hundred years descendants of these young people could read about their grandparents, and scholars of universities or the labor force or even the history of emotions could learn about what activities were going on in academic departments and how we saw the workplace. I’m sure there are AI helps to analyze any troves of letters that exist out there and to organize them by themes, etc. But there’s nothing like reading along and finding a bit of juicy gossip and realizing the humanity of those who have gone before us.
For those of you who have read this far and who write letters of recommendation, it could be really delightful to begin to think of them as the last of the correspondence, and as bits of evidence for historians of the future to investigate.
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