Jeff Tompkins is a writer and teacher of English as a Second Language living in New York City. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1967 and was educated at Brown University and University College ...

The Earl of Chesterfield, the 18th-century British statesman and patron of the arts, had a number of concerns about his illegitimate son Philip, but one he revisited often in his posthumously ...

Undergraduates need them for graduate-school applications; PhD students and postdocs use them to apply for fellowships and jobs; senior scientists often have to have them to apply for awards and ...

The cover letter is its own unique, dreaded genre of writing. In a few — often formulaic — paragraphs, job applicants must accomplish several things: prostrate themselves at the feet of hiring ...

Are you open to the idea that the open letter has become the victim of its own success? Nowadays, calling something an open letter seems like redundant, repetitious repetition. After all, what isn't ...