How Formal Should a Cover Letter Be?
Formality is a dial, not a virtue. Turned up too far it produces the standard failure of the genre: a page of correct sentences that sound like nobody, written by someone who was worried about sounding wrong.
The target isn’t formal or casual. It’s the register you’d use writing to a competent colleague you don’t know well — clear, unfussy, no jokes you’d have to explain.
Where the stiffness comes from
People writing cover letters reach for a voice they don’t otherwise use, because the situation feels high-stakes and formality feels safe. It isn’t safe. It’s just quieter about failing.
The specific symptoms are easy to list:
- Verbs turned into nouns: undertook the implementation of rather than implemented.
- Passive constructions with no actor: responsibilities were assumed for the reporting function.
- Latinate words in place of plain ones: utilise, commence, endeavour, facilitate.
- Sentences that begin with a throat-clear: It is worth noting that, I would like to take this opportunity to.
- Whole phrases that exist only as connective tissue: in terms of, with regard to the above.
None of these are errors. Each one costs a little clarity and a little of the impression that a person is present, and by the fifth paragraph the accumulated cost is the whole letter.
The same paragraph at three settings
Hypothetical, from someone applying for a project role.
Too formal: Throughout my tenure at Halloran Systems, I was afforded the opportunity to assume responsibility for the coordination of a multi-stakeholder initiative involving the consolidation of disparate procurement processes. This undertaking necessitated extensive engagement with departmental leadership.
Too casual: So at Halloran I basically ended up running this whole procurement mess, which was honestly a nightmare — four departments all doing their own thing and nobody wanting to budge. Fun times! But we got there in the end.
About right: At Halloran I ended up running the procurement consolidation — four departments, four sets of suppliers, and no agreement about who was allowed to approve a purchase. Most of the work was getting the four heads into one process rather than building the process.
The third version is the shortest, the most specific, and the only one where you can tell what the person did. Note that it isn’t chatty. It’s plain, which is a different thing — the casual version is failing for the same underlying reason as the formal one, which is that both are performing a register instead of conveying information.
Reading the employer’s register
You have a sample of their writing: the posting. Match it approximately.
Signals of a more formal reader: full job titles used consistently, “candidates are invited to,” named criteria you’re asked to address in order, a reference number, third-person description of the organisation. Common in public sector, universities, law, medicine, large regulated firms.
Signals of a less formal one: “you’ll,” “we’re looking for,” a first-person plural voice, a named person in the posting, humour, brackets used for asides.
Match roughly, and when in doubt sit one notch more formal than the posting rather than one notch less. But note what “more formal” means: correct greeting, no slang, no exclamation marks. It does not mean utilise.
The public-sector and academic case is worth flagging separately, because there formality often isn’t the real requirement — structure is. If a posting lists selection criteria and asks you to address them, the expected document answers them in order under headings, and elegance matters less than completeness. That’s a different form from a persuasive letter, and writing a graceful three-paragraph letter instead will lose to a plodding one that covers all eight criteria.
Country and language
Conventions differ, sometimes sharply, and there’s no universal rule to fall back on.
Some markets expect a distinctly formal letter with a full address block, a fixed greeting, and a fixed closing formula, where deviating reads as sloppiness. Others treat the letter as an email and find the formal version comical. Some expect personal details in an application that would be unusual or unlawful to include elsewhere.
If you’re applying into a country whose norms you don’t know, find one example of a real application in that market or ask one person who works there. That’s a five-minute investment and it beats guessing. See also applying from abroad, which deals with the content side of the same problem.
If you’re writing in a second language, err toward short sentences. Long formal constructions are where non-native writing goes wrong most visibly, and short plain sentences are both safer and better prose. Nobody has ever been marked down for clarity.
Contractions, first person, and other minor anxieties
Contractions — I’m, don’t, it’s — are fine in almost every context and make prose sound like speech. Drop them for the most formal institutional applications if it makes you comfortable, but the letter won’t be rejected for containing “I’m.”
Starting sentences with “I” is unavoidable in a document about yourself and the contortions people use to avoid it are worse than the repetition. Vary sentence openings for rhythm, not for principle.
Humour is a genuine risk in a document read by a stranger who can’t see your face. A dry aside inside a specific point is usually safe. A joke as the opening line is a coin flip — see the first sentence.
Exclamation marks: one, at most, and only in a genuinely warm channel. Zero is always defensible.
The read-aloud test
Read the letter out loud. Any sentence you stumble over, or that you’d never say to a person, gets rewritten in the words you’d actually use.
This catches nearly everything. Nobody says “I am writing to express my strong interest.” Nobody says “please do not hesitate to contact me.” You’d say “I’m applying for the analyst role” and “happy to talk whenever suits,” and both are better, and the reason they’re better is that they sound like a person wrote them to another person — which is the entire point of the document, as what a cover letter is actually for argues at more length.