Letters of support: Crafting the text

The concluding part of our letter-writing workshop provides some dos and don’ts

Part one of this two-part series covered the different types of letters of support (LoS), their purposes and intentions, and the awkward ritual of offering to ‘draft some text’ for the signatory. This second part will focus on crafting the text. I will suggest a structure that has worked well for me in the past, but first I want to concentrate on what not to do.

Don’t expect there to be ‘standard text’ for letters of support—and if you find one, don’t use it. The problem with standard text is that if it’s standard, it’s going to have to fit every possible project, which means it is specific to none of them. Standard text therefore operates at such a level of abstraction that it’s meaningless. I’ve written before about the dangers of ‘cut and paste’ text—sections of an application that could be cut and pasted into anyone else’s application with a minimum of editing—and standard text is exactly that. Unless you’ve been asked for a potted history of your institution, you should never use it.