Day 23: Recommendations & proofreading help

For the past week or so it’s been rec time all the time. I ended up with 14 college recs and our school has an internal deadline where they are all due early in the year. I thought I might die.

But two things helped me get through. One was taking Sam Shah’s excellent tips on writing college recs and creating a Google doc with 15 questions that I have each student complete. I try to send this document out as soon as I’m asked in May, and try to send a few reminders over the summer. I still find I have a few people who forget to do this, and sometimes the responses aren’t all that helpful, so I need to keep working on the form.

The other huge help is having my computer read the rec to me for proofreading. I can’t tell you how many errors I’ve caught in my writing using this trick, and it’s dead simple to use.