If I could delete one sentence from every cover letter ever written, it would be "I am writing to express my interest in the position advertised on your website." It tells the reader nothing they did not already know from the fact that an application arrived.
The format problem is really a job-allocation problem. Each paragraph has exactly one thing to do, and letters fall apart when paragraph one tries to do the job of paragraph two, or when paragraph three turns into a second resume.
The plan, with a word budget attached
Purdue's writing lab describes the letter as the document that introduces you, explains why you are writing, and establishes your credibility. Split across a page, that becomes four jobs, and the middle one deserves most of the space.
| Paragraph | Its one job | Words | Failure mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening | Name the role and give one specific reason you are credible for it | 40–60 | Admiration for the company |
| Evidence | One or two achievements with numbers, chosen from the posting | 120–180 | Retelling your resume in order |
| Fit | Why this employer, based on something only this employer does | 60–90 | A sentence that fits any company |
| Close | What happens next, plainly | 25–40 | Apologising for their time |
Three hundred words, give or take. The ratio matters more than the total — if your evidence paragraph is not the longest thing on the page by a clear margin, the letter is upside down.
Paragraph one, where nearly everyone loses the reader
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The opening exists to earn paragraph two. That is all. It does not need a hook, a quote, or a story about being seven years old and taking apart a radio.
Compare these two.
I am writing to express my enthusiasm for the Marketing Coordinator role at Verano Foods. I have always been passionate about food and brand storytelling, and I believe my skills align well with your needs.
I'm applying for the Marketing Coordinator role. Your posting asks for someone who can run lifecycle email without a designer — that is what I did for eighteen months at a 30-person DTC brand, sending about 40 campaigns a quarter.
The second is shorter and does three things the first does not: it names the constraint in the posting, it claims a specific capability, and it attaches a rough volume so the claim is checkable. Nobody has to take anything on faith.
A trick if you are stuck: pull the single hardest requirement out of the job posting and answer it in the first two sentences. When postings are long and padded, running them through the text summarizer first makes the real requirements much easier to spot than reading 900 words of "About Us."
Paragraph two is the letter
This is where the word budget goes, and it should be one or two achievements told properly rather than five listed thinly.
Told properly means: the situation was X, I did Y, the result was Z, and here is a number attached to Z. Two of those, at roughly 70 words each, is a strong middle. Five bullet-style claims at 30 words each is a worse letter that took longer to write.
Pick the achievements from the posting, not from your pride. The project you are proudest of is often the one least relevant to the job in front of you, and a letter that spends 150 words on your favorite work while ignoring the role's central requirement reads as someone applying to a job they invented.
Paragraph three, and the test it has to pass
One test: if you swapped in a competitor's name, would the paragraph still be true? If yes, delete it and start again.
Real specificity comes from things you can only know by paying attention — a product they shipped last quarter, a market they just entered, a problem their own job posting admits to. "Your team is expanding into the Canadian market and you say the current reporting stack can't handle multi-currency" is a sentence you cannot write about anyone else.
Two sentences is plenty. This paragraph is the shortest one that is not the close.
The annotated version, end to end
Opening (47 words). I'm applying for the Operations Coordinator role. Your posting describes 40-plus daily loads across three dispatchers with no shared view of capacity — that was my day job for two years at Renton Haulage, and it is the reason I'm writing rather than a general interest in logistics.
Evidence (151 words). At Renton I inherited a dispatch board that lived in one person's spreadsheet. Carriers were double-booked roughly twice a week and nobody could tell which loads were at risk until a driver called. I mapped every recurring lane, moved the board into a shared tool the whole team could edit, and set a 9am standing check on the next 48 hours. Double-bookings went from about eight a month to under one, and on-time collection went from 83 percent to 94 percent over two quarters. The part I'd do differently is the rollout — I built the whole thing before showing anyone, and it took three weeks of resistance before the dispatchers trusted it.
Fit (63 words). Harlow's posting mentions a move into temperature-controlled freight next year. That is the version of this job I want, because the scheduling constraints get genuinely interesting once a load has a clock on it as well as a route.
Close (27 words). I'd welcome a conversation. I'm available most afternoons and can share the lane-mapping template if it's useful.
That is 288 words. Note the admission in the middle paragraph — the rollout line. A small, specific piece of self-criticism does more for credibility than any adjective, and almost nobody includes one.
Write it in the right order
Write paragraph two first. Then three, then four, then the opening last, in one sentence, once you know what the letter is actually claiming.
Paste the job posting and your two best facts into our free AI Cover Letter Generator to get a draft that already has the four parts in the right proportions — then rewrite the opening yourself, because that is the paragraph a generator will always make too polite.
FAQ
Should a cover letter have bullet points?
Occasionally, and never more than three. A short bulleted list can work in the evidence paragraph when you are matching several hard requirements — a certification, a system, a language — that would read as a clumsy run-on in prose. What does not work is a letter that is mostly bullets, because it becomes a resume with a greeting on top.
How do I address a cover letter when there is no name in the posting?
"Dear Hiring Manager" is fine and nobody has ever been rejected for it. Spending twenty minutes hunting a name on LinkedIn to guess wrong is worse than the generic greeting. What you should avoid is "To Whom It May Concern," which reads like a form letter, and "Dear Sir or Madam," which reads like 1987.
Do I need a different letter for every application?
The evidence paragraph can be reused across similar roles with light edits. The opening and the fit paragraph cannot, because both are built entirely from the specific posting. In practice that means about ten minutes per application rather than an hour, which is the difference between tailoring and writing from scratch.