How acceptable is it to copy and paste a certain structure and some particular sentences in letters of recommendation?

Question

I hope this isn't a silly question, but I was wondering how acceptable it'd be to copy and paste a certain structure and some particular sentences in letters of recommendation.

Of course, I'm not thinking of copying and pasting anything very specific about the candidate, but there are certain traits that are shared among students and I also have a certain structure that I like and ties nicely with particular sentences (e.g., when talking about the student as being collegial, responsible, always meeting deadlines etc.). I'm not good with words so the truth is that the more I can reuse the phrases that I like, the faster I can write it and the quality of the text will likely be better as well.

Would this be flagged by some review software? If it is, would one regard it as unethical to reuse stretches of previous letters? I should clarify that all the particular strengths, projects etc. of the student won't be copied and pasted, just sentences about general traits and so forth, or greetings, paragraph transitions, all the repetitive stuff. I guess my real question is: is it ok to use a standard template and just make the required adjustments? Or do I need to keep rephrasing the same points?

Answer 1

Using a template is totally fine. I do that, as does every professor I know. In fact, I shared a chunk of my template in an answer to another question. A lot of those sentences get reused in letters I write, and tailored to the individual person. It's usually a good idea to start with a letter you wrote for a similar student applying to similar things (e.g., PhD programs vs REUs).

Would this be flagged by some review software?

There is no review software designed to prevent this practice, because it's so widespread.

If it is, would one regard it as unethical to reuse stretches of previous letters?

It's not unethical.

I guess my real question is: is it ok to use a standard template and just make the required adjustments? Or do I need to keep rephrasing the same points?

It's fine to use a template and make the required adjustments. There are more important things to spend your time on than writing every letter of recommendation from scratch!

Answer 2

Generic and boilerplate text has the property that it comes across as, well, generic and boilerplate. For this reason, an effective letter of recommendation will contain descriptions of an individual that are specific to that person. People simply do not find generic praise compelling or persuasive. So if you want to make your description of someone as collegial or responsible convincing, it's pretty essential to give some specific details of actual behavior that gave you that positive impression. That's what I try to do when writing letters of recommendation; it's basically the show, don't tell principle of writing.

Coming back to your question: if your letter conforms to the principle of containing a good amount of details specific to the person you are writing about, but also contains some boilerplate/copied-and-pasted language, I think that's fine. But if your idea was that through reusing content from past letters you could escape the need to formulate a coherent description of a specific individual and why they need to be hired/admitted/given a fellowship/etc, I think that's a very misguided idea, as a letter without those kinds of details will simply be completely ineffective and won't provide any benefit for the student's applications. Whether it's ethical to write such a letter becomes the question of whether it's ethical to write a useless letter, knowing that it's useless. I think the answer is pretty clear.

Answer 3

On the one hand, you're copying from yourself, so there's no issue of plagiarism or copyright violation or anything like that. I don't see any legal or ethical issue.

I don't know if job recruiters use plagiarism detection software. Would they do some sort of automated review that would spot the repetition? I don't know. I'd guess not. No one is concerned about plagiarism in a letter of recommendation. Even if it was true that someone copied a letter of recommendation off the Internet and then edited it up, so what? The HR department isn't grading the letter of recommendation for originality. They're evaluating the job candidate.

What WOULD concern me is if the HR department got two letters from you for two different students and noticed they were almost identical. At that point they might conclude you weren't really writing about the individual student but just had a stock letter of recommendation that you sent out for anyone who asked for it.

If the template part is truly only the most generic stuff, "I am a professor at Foobar College and ____________ asked me for a letter of recommendation" or some such, I doubt anyone would worry about it. But if you had standard phrases that you used for every student, "_______ is very hard-working and intelligent", etc, that might make an HR person think that you really didn't put any thought into this.