Draft Personalized Letters
By now, hopefully, you see how helpful AI tools can be for drafting content.
Of course, there are limits to what AI can do, and it can easily make mistakes—just like people. There are also limits to what you can and should share with AI tools like ChatGPT. If you aren’t sure what we mean, we encourage you to make time for our lesson on Privacy.
A quick recap: You should never share personally identifiable information—such as names, ages, birthdays, or addresses—with an AI tool. Luckily, you don’t have to.
We’ll show you how you can easily get AI to draft personalized recommendation letters using simple prompts without identifying details.
First, gather relevant information about the person you’re recommending. This would include their achievements, skills, qualities, and any specific examples of their work or contributions. You can include this information without naming or identifying anyone. You just need to include enough to give the model an idea of the person you’re writing about.
Navigate to your favorite generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Bing’s Copilot. For this example, we’ve chosen to use Bing. With Bing, you can adjust the tone of the conversation to be more creative, balanced, or precise.
Then, enter a prompt with enough information to generate a template or framework. You’ll want to include the details you gathered previously as well as the purpose of the letter, whether it be applying for college, a scholarship, a special academic program, or something else.
For example, our prompt was: “Can you draft a formal recommendation letter for a student who is applying to college? The student is the senior class president, our soccer team’s star goalie, a member of the math club, and editor of the yearbook.”
Finally, copy the generated content and paste it into your preferred word processing program. Fill in the missing personal details, such as names and addresses.
You might want to add an anecdote or two to make the letter more personal and authentic. Ensure that the letter is coherent, well-structured, and meets your requirements.
Note: You can always provide clarifications if the model you use generates content that doesn’t align with your intent or if you need something to be longer or shorter. You can also ask for alternative phrasing or adjustments to better fit your style.
But wait! What if you have a student with a less impressive list of accomplishments to point out or no major accomplishments? AI can help with that too!
Try a prompt like this one we tested with ChatGPT: “Draft a recommendation letter for a mediocre student. She has so-so grades. She doesn’t have any extracurriculars, but she tries her best.”
