How to write a letter of recommendation

As a ex-teacher, I have felt the pain of writing yet another letter of recommendation for my students.

Every semester, I would get 5-6 requests for letters of recommendation. Being the good person that I am, I would spend nights writing quality letters for my students. When writing a letter of recommendation, the word choice and structure would be of utmost importance. It would take me hours and hours to get everything perfect, up to my standards.

After quitting my teacher position (teachers are seriously under payed), I started my own business in the computer field and once again, I was asked to write letters of recommendation for my employees. No matter what I did for a living, they seemed to haunt me, and I started to dread the thought of spending countless hours coming up with new formats, revising the letters and making them look at professional as possible. I was fed up.

So I decided to take a short cut, and the end result was better than when I was doing it the long way. I ran across this book that had the perfect formulas for recommendation letters. Now I knew how to write the letters before, but once I understood the tricks of writing professional letters, it took me 30 minutes to write a great letter instead of 6 hours.

Now the only thing I don't like is that the book also comes with 67 templates of recommendation letters. The templates sort of ruin it for me. It means that anyone can write themselves a letter of recommendation in 5 minutes without any effort. People who actually spend 6 hours writing a letter should get rewarded for their efforts. Now we're going to have people using templates and getting better results with 5 minutes of work.

I hope that people who get the book will at least have some originality and not exclusively use the templates.