When a friend of mine – I’ll call her Carol – asked me to help with a
job cover letter last weekend, I said sure, piece of cake. I write and
edit for a living. How difficult could it be to fix a page of my
friend’s prose?
Painfully difficult, it turns out. I spent hours sweating over
Carol’s letter, and even then I didn’t feel I had cracked it. The first
line stumped me, and still does. “I am very pleased to submit my
application,” she began. That seemed awfully stiff, and besides, the
company she was addressing would be lucky to hire her. But my
alternative was too informal, and possibly overconfident: “I would be
thrilled to become . . .”
For help, I combed through the web and turned to three of my job coach
sources. I found lots of horribly written letters (“As a highly skilled
sales manager with proven experience . . .”) and some difference of
opinion. My conclusion: Cover letters make a difference, even short
ones. Don’t ever send a boilerplate “Enclosed please find résumé” note.
Do tell a story and even crack a joke if you can. Always mention mutual
contacts, and make sure you proofread carefully. Even though today’s
cover letter is always an e-mail with a résumé attached, as opposed to a
hard copy sent by snail mail, do err on the side of a more formal prose
style, avoiding common e-mail abbreviations like “u” instead of “you.”
By Susan Adams
By Susan Adams
