A fifth-year graduate student asks— 

I’ve been applying for months and trying to follow the advice to tailor all of my application documents. I’ve gotten pretty good at quickly fixing up the terminology in my resumes, but tailoring my cover letters is taking way too much time. I spent a lot of effort tailoring for my first applications, but the process is dragging out, and I can’t spend that much time on my application now. How can I do this faster? Is there a way to write a more general cover letter that I can get more use out of? 

Hopefully, your experience writing cover letters makes the process faster over time as you get more comfortable, in the same way that tailoring your resumes is going faster, but here are some tips that can help you prioritize and save yourself time in the long-run. 

• Consider writing shorter cover letters! A solid cover letter only needs to explain why you want the position, describe what you’re planning to do in the near future, and address any glaring issues that arise from reading your resume. If you have been including a lot of biographical information or information easily gleaned from your resume, that is wasted time. 
• For most people I’ve worked with, writing your cover letter from a blank page is ultimately faster than working off of a previous draft, a template, or GenAI output. The process of revising, adding, and correcting often takes a lot longer than you expect. 
• Try adopting a more conversational tone! Many writers get hung up on trying to write about themselves in a “professional” voice, but cover letters can be written very conversationally (that’s one of their main advantages). Try writing in the same way you would to a friend or close colleague, and you may find the writing goes much faster and smoother. In fact, in our workshops, I often ask people to write a draft as if they were texting a friend in just a few minutes, and the end results are surprisingly close to finished! 

Hopefully, some of these tips can help you streamline your cover letter writing; personally, I’d aim to be spending less than 30 minutes on any one cover letter. I think that trying to write a very general cover letter that you can use for multiple applications is unlikely to save you time in long-run, especially since it will probably be way less effective than one written purely for a specific application and position. 

-David Blancha, Assistant Director, Career Development Team for Researchers