My complete works

For this is recommendation season, one of the most distinctive periods of the academic year. It begins in late August and runs through November. Suddenly you hear from undergraduates, former and current, who are thinking about graduate or professional school, Ph.D.s or M.F.A.s. Graduate students still in the midst of their time at Princeton need grants to do their dissertation research. Those who are finishing their theses hope to find post-docs or jobs.

Other requests come from outside the Orange Bubble. Graduate students at other universities ask for help, and you give it when it doesn’t involve a conflict with your own students. Young friends in the profession are applying for grants or up for tenure, older ones are ripe for promotion to endowed chairs or translation to jobs with wider responsibilities. In every case a letter must be written.

Recommendation season sometimes makes me consider imitating the Austrian tenor Leo Slezak. A writer as well as a singer, he told wonderful stories about the opera: for example, the one about the swan boat that moved too early during a production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” leaving Slezak marooned on stage. Without missing a beat, he turned to the audience and asked, “When does the next swan leave?” In 1922 he collected some of his short writings under the modest title “My Complete Works.” A few years later, since he had written more, he published a second book: “A Promise Broken.”

So why not “My Complete Letters of Recommendation”? It could make an entertaining and useful book. I’d choose only the most distinctive letters and delete all names and identifying marks. The collection would provide anyone who needed to write recommendations with models of equivocal praise (“Good wasn’t the word for his thesis,” “You’ll be lucky if you can get her to work for you”), as well as a thesaurus’s worth of adjectives, all of them superlatives since grade inflation, though banished from Princeton, still rules in the economy of letter-writing.

In reality, of course, “My Complete Letters of Recommendation” will never appear, even if the idea seems tempting when the requests bestrew my virtual desk as autumn leaves do my lawn. Recommendations are, and should be, absolutely private: written only for the eyes of those making the decision in question. They also are — or should be — serious pieces of writing: efforts to interest readers who are working through, in many cases, hundreds of identical-looking files. Adjectival fluff won’t do that. As Michele Lamont showed in her study of academic judgment, “How Professors Think,” experienced readers look for letters that say specific things about the person being considered and the work he or she plans to do: “The more terms of praise I see in a letter,” one philosopher explained, “the less attention I gave it. The more description, the more attention.”

So here’s a little advice for those of you who might, just conceivably, ask your professors for letters over the weeks and months to come. The most important thing to remember is as simple as it is regularly ignored: only someone who actually knows you well can bring out the qualities that would make you a good potential lawyer, professor, Peace Corps volunteer or anything else.

Second, be sure that the people from whom you request letters have some idea what you’ve been up to lately. Provide a fresh CV, a writing sample, something that gives an idea of what you’re up to. And do it right away. Again and again an electronic prompt arrives in my e-mailbox, I revise and upload a letter on the basis of what I can remember, and then, a couple of weeks later, the recommendee writes to me to ask if I’d like to know what he or she has been working on.

Third, whenever possible use referees whose enthusiasm — for their work and for yours — really impressed you. In the passionless, professionalized world where most of us spend most of our time, a letter written with real passion and engagement can make a huge difference — can convey your own passion for what you do.

So please, bear these rules in mind, and remember that a junior professor who meets these criteria will write a much more effective letter than a famous person who doesn’t. You’ll get the recommendations you deserve, and I’ll be able to spend a little less time rounding up the usual suspect adjectives — and a little more doing justice to the people for whom I should be writing.

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.