Embarrassing Typos in Letter of Recommendation

determined2300
Wed, 14 Jan 2015 03:59:29 +0000

Although the teacher’s typos won’t negatively affect you, her inability to clearly express her thoughts me.

I suggest you send another teacher’s LOR too. Look at the last example, of Brian, in this link from MIT giving tips to the teachers for writing recommendations:

http://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/writingrecs

The critique says, “This is an example of an evaluation in which we really don’t know what the writer is trying to tell us. The comments provided certainly do not give much substantive information. We are left wondering whether there is just not much to say about this student or whether the teacher just didn’t bother to put much effort into the recommendation. This is a situation where we will probably form our impressions based on the pattern of all the recommendations. If all are equally uninformative, we will assume there wasn’t much to say, but if the others are better, we will assume this teacher did not give much effort to the recommendation.”

You see, the adcomms know whether it was the teacher’s ignorance or whether the student is simply not good. Sending another recommendation helps them compare and form a conclusion.