Reference letter

This structures a reference letter the way a professional-services firm's principal writes one for a contractor, an associate or a client's own staff at the end of an engagement. Enter the months the engagement or the role ran, the pieces of work worth a paragraph, the strengths worth naming, how many specific examples each strength gets and how many results carry a number, and the page returns the words the letter will run to, the paragraphs it needs, the words per paragraph, the years it covers, the facts it names and the seconds a checker needs to read it. A reference is a document with a structure behind it; these are the parts, from your own knowledge of the person, and the length a checker will actually read is the first figure on the page.

Open with the facts a checker verifies

The first paragraph carries the facts a reference checker confirms before reading further: who you are, in what capacity you knew the person, the role or the engagement, and the period it ran. The worked example gives that paragraph seventy words, enough to state the relationship plainly and no more, because a checker who cannot find the dates in the first lines assumes the writer is being vague on purpose. The years line prints the period times ten so eighteen months reads as a figure rather than rounding to one.

One paragraph per piece of work, one per strength, an example for each

A letter that says the person was excellent names nothing; a letter that names the two pieces of work they delivered and the three strengths they showed, with a specific example for each strength and a result with a number where there is one, is the letter a checker remembers. The page prices each of those at the words it needs, forty for a piece of work, forty-five for a strength plus thirty per example, twenty-five per quantified result, and prints the paragraph count so the structure is visible before a word is written.

The structure is the method; the record is the product

The length, the paragraphs and the facts on the page are free, for every letter, forever. What Sowbird Pro adds is the record: the engagement kept against the client as it runs, with the work delivered, the strengths noticed and the results recorded at the time, so the letter is written from what happened rather than from memory a year later, and the letter itself kept with who it went to and when. A firm that keeps that record writes references in ten minutes and stands behind every one.