How to write a cover letter

One page, 250 to 400 words, three to five short paragraphs. That is roughly half a page of text at normal spacing and it leaves white space, which is what makes it look like something a person will finish. Under 200 words reads as indifference. Over 450 does not get read to the end, and the part that gets cut is your closing, which is where your availability sits.

No, with one narrow exception: some academic, senior public-sector and international-grant applications specify a longer letter or a statement of intent, and those tell you so explicitly. For every ordinary job application, a second page means the letter has become a retelling of your resume. If you cannot fit it on one page, the problem is almost always that you are summarising your history rather than making one argument.

The resume is a structured record of what you have done, in a fixed format, written without pronouns and read in about twenty seconds. The cover letter is a short piece of first-person writing that argues why that record is relevant to one specific job at one specific employer. The resume answers "what have you done"; the letter answers "why are you writing to us". You need both when the posting asks for both, and the letter should never repeat the resume.

The opening and the third paragraph have to change every time, because those are the two that name the employer and answer their posting. The middle paragraph — your one piece of proof with a number in it — usually survives unchanged across applications in the same field. So in practice you are rewriting about a third of it, which is twenty minutes, not an hour. A letter that has obviously been sent to twenty companies is worse than no letter.

The structure does not change; the proof paragraph draws on coursework, part-time work, volunteering or something you built yourself, and it still needs an outcome and a number. The advantage you have is that you can be specific about why this employer, which experienced applicants often skip. Say what you learned that maps to the job, and be direct about what you have not done yet rather than writing around it.

For the first draft and the structure, yes, and it saves the blank-page half hour. For the parts that actually persuade, no — a model does not know your number, your story or the honest sentence about what you cannot do yet, and a letter made only of what it can guess reads exactly like one. Use it to get the shape down, then replace every generic sentence with something only you could have written.

Yes. Open the letter and pick "Download PDF": it comes with the same name, headline, contact line, colour and font as the CV you wrote it from, so the two read as one application. It is free without a watermark on the Basic template and with Premium.