Help me with writing a letter of recommendation for a ninth-grader.

In terms of playing up your end...I would paint as positive and laudatory picture as you can about her first. A better way to come accross as a letter of rec that matters than just spouting degrees is to make a very insightful and well-applied comment about one of her weakenesses or areas in need of growth - like, for instance, this place may have a BRILLIANT literature department, and your recomendee has yet to be exposed to that sort of level of excellence in literature. Thus, she would be an asset AND would get a lot out of being there!

Hope it goes well. That time is SO stressful.

How does this sound? Even I can see loads of problems with it but I'm terrible at this stuff, held me out here. Also should it be longer?

This letter is intended to serve as school recommendation for K H. Working as a camp counsellor at Life-Tech Ventures (Charlton, MA), I got to know K over the four weeks she stayed at camp this summer. Hugely popular with kids and staff alike, I was thrilled to be chosen by her mother as the one to write this letter – countless other teachers would have been just as happy to write it, and just as enthusiastic within.

Both my own education, at Westminster and Oxford, and the counselling and educational work I have done, gives me confidence in my ability to recognise a bright kid – K is not just a bright kid, but one of the brightest I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. She is both naturally capable and a tenacious worker; she is sharp, witty, and surprisingly wise.

K’s intellectual curiosity at camp was virtually boundless. LTV has a fairly academic curriculum of daytime activities, taught by specialist teachers – the free ‘rec time’ spent with counsellors was used by many campers as a break from this. For K, however, it merely offered new ways to challenge herself, whether it was in solving the difficult cryptic riddles she would ask me to set her, or playing Mao, a card game in which the complex and arcane rules must be worked out through trial and error, and a reward of winning a hand was to introduce and enforce one’s own rule for the rest of the session. Whenever complex rule interactions arose, K dealt with them in a way that showed not only great clarity of mind, but also a real pleasure in the act of difficult intellectual manipulations for their own sake.

Hugely charming, gregarious and intelligent, I believe wholeheartedly that she would be as much a credit to Dalton as she already is to LTV and to her age in general. If you’d like to discuss her application further, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely,
Greg Etc

(should there be a paragraph about outgoingness before the last one? what should I say in it?)

HEY FASCIST CAPITALIST PRIVATE ELITIST SCHOOL. LET THIS INSANE GIRL FROM A MENTALLY UNSTABLE FAMILY FROM A BAD PART OF TOWN WHERE EVERYONE IS ADDICTED TO AND DEALS DRUGS INTO YOUR SNOBBISH SCHOOL FOR RICH CUNTS OR I WILL BOMB IT FOR SOCIALISM. YOU KNOW I AM A COMMUNIST BECAUSE OXFORD BLAH BLAH.

ALSO SHE IS VERY OUTGOING (WITH BOYS AND MEN OF ALL AGES)

SIGNED,
THE PEOPLE'S PROTECTOR

argh this is difficult

I've got to write a college recc for a student I taught last year and I keep procrastinating bc getting into the 'write a bunch of complimentary bullshit in a smile-smile tone' state is the worst kind of state to be in

yeah my english professor from last semester is applying for a full professorship at other universities and asked me to write her a student rec letter for her portfolio. it's not like, hard - i know what i want to say and roughly how to compose one of these things - but i just want to make sure it's perfect because it seems important to her