God bless Robert Darnton for beginning his discussion of letters of recommendation like this:
The main problem in writing letters of recommendation derives from a basic contradiction: the recommender wants to promote the candidate, yet at the same time he or she needs to convey the impression of giving an objective evaluation. I see no way around this problem. Unnuanced encomium will inspire disbelief, and unadorned frankness will be self-defeating. The most common strategy is to begin the recommendation with a barrage of praise and then to add nuances that can sound somewhat critical. On the whole, this works: the recipient is assumed to be savvy enough to discount for the rhetoric while understanding that the recommended is a less-than-perfect human being, like the rest of us. The trick is to get the balance right.
Too right. For the love of mike, people, everything we write is an artifice, a trick, and if well-performed, a tour de force — which is to say, a stunt. There is no shame in this — there is no point in professing shame at this — it is unavoidable. On the other hand, how can it be possible it’s necessary for Darnton to point this out — that roughly thirty years since “the linguistic turn” we have a profession infested with people who think that narrative can be the romantic effusion of a soul, presented unmediated to the reader? Jeez-o-pete.
Related anecdote: In a certain federal British university, the tutors sending students for instruction to experts in another field write what amount to internal letters of recommendation. They are brutally frank. Indeed, I believe there is an implicit competition to undersell your pupils. “Jones is a bit thick, but diligent.” “Johnson cannot focus on one thing for two minutes running and, as I taught his father, I can say he has the family tendency to value rowing higher than writing. Still, one does what one can.”
2 comments
November 6, 2007 at 10:32 pm
kelmanari
“as I taught his father, I can say he has the family tendency to value rowing higher than writing. Still, one does what one can.”
LOL. I’ve never typed those three letters together before. It felt really, really good. I’m young again. And free.
November 6, 2007 at 10:41 pm
eric
The English class system exists to amuse the North Americans, who live a life immune from its effects.