We all get rejected.
There was a time in my academic career when I was rejected for 10 grant proposals in a row.
Ouch.
Each rejection letter was hard to receive, but some were much better than others.
It is hard to write a good rejection letter.
Rejection is intrinsically threatening to the other person's self-esteem.
If you don't do it well, you risk hurting the other person, damaging the relationship, and making yourself and your organization look bad.
But if you do it well, you can write a letter that gets the job done and preserves the relationship.
As in so many other tough communication situations, the trick is to do what needs to be done and still maintain the friendship or business relationship. With skill and practice it is even possible to write rejection letters that people value.
I want to show you an example of a beautifully written rejection letter and talk about how to write a rejection letter with class and style.
Rejection
One of the hardest things we have to do in life is reject people. Sometimes we have to do it face to face, like when we're breaking up with someone or telling them they didn't get a job or that we have to fire them. Sometimes we have to do it in writing.
There's a meme going around the Internet right now, especially on Twitter, which says, #ShareYourRejections. It's meant to make people feel better about the fact that artists and professionals of all kinds experience a lot of rejection, and that it's normal.
By sharing our rejections, we can make one another feel better about the inevitable rejections that we all receive in life. Some of these rejections are horrible. Maybe in future posts, I'll show you some of these terrible rejections.
In today’s post, I want to show you a beautifully written rejection letter, about as good as you can possibly get. In fact, this rejection letter was written with so much class and style and managed to make the person who received it feel so good that he actually framed it.
He tweeted a picture of this framed rejection letter from the Paris Review, which is a famous literary magazine, hanging on the wall of his office, because it actually made him feel so good. It's a beautiful letter. Here it is.
Now let’s talk about the rejection letter and what makes it so effective.
Part 1 – Thanks and Appreciation
“Dear J.P. Steed,
Let me begin by expressing appreciation for your patience; I know how frustrating it can be to wait for a response, and I thank you for holding out for us all these months.”
We see in the beginning it starts extremely graciously. It begins actually with a thank you and then an acknowledgement of the person's feelings, and then a second thank you. It begins extremely politely and graciously.
“Appreciation for your patience; I know how frustrating it can be to wait for a response.”
That's an empathic acknowledgement of the other person's feelings.
“… and I thank you for holding out for us all these months.”
Again, giving thanks for patience.
Part 2 – The Warning Shot
“Now the news I'm very sorry to have to tell you…”
This is what we call a warning shot. It's a great strategy for delivering any kind of bad news when you're about to deliver bad news. One of your tasks is to prepare the person that you're talking to, to receive this emotionally upsetting news.
One way that we see people do this when we're coaching health professionals and they have to give bad news to patients is they do what we call a warning shot, or a shot across the bow. It's basically a preparatory remark. Before they deliver the actual bad news, they tell you, “I'm about to give you bad news.” This allows the person to prepare him or herself emotionally and psychologically, to receive this bad news. Now, here it comes in writing, but it's just as effective.
“Now the news, I'm very sorry to have to tell you: We are unable to accept your story for publication.”
I think one of the gracious things about giving a rejection or giving bad news is to cut to the chase quickly, not to beat around the bush and not to be ambiguous. So here are the various after the thanks and the appreciation, he cuts right to the chase. He gives the warning shot and then there's the bad news.
“We're unable to accept your story for a publication.”
For any writer, this is a very humbling piece of bad news. But the rest of the letter I think is fascinating because although he comes right out with the bad news, he could have put it at the very end of the letter, but he puts it in the beginning of the letter because this letter writer has a lot of class and style. He then goes on for three paragraphs to talk about what was good and bad about the letter.
Part 3 – Compliments
“’Wild Boar’ is excellent.”
There's a compliment.
“In my opinion, the best unsolicited manuscript to come through this office in some time. The entire staff here read it and commented on it, and everyone had good things to say. One person called it ‘terrific,’ and several others pointed out how convincingly the teenage characters had been drawn.”
All of that is complimentary. Often in advice about how to give bad news, we tell people to give the good news first. I'm not sure that's always the right thing to do.
If the news is really bad, like if a patient has died in surgery, you don't want to say at first, “Well, your mom did real well at the beginning of the surgery, she was a real trooper,” and then say she died at the end. That's not going to work. But in this situation, I think giving a little bit of compliment first is effective.
Part 4 – Constructive Criticism
The whole paragraph is basically complimenting the work and then it goes into the criticism. I think often we think that criticism is the hardest part of the letter. How do we give people criticism without hurting their feelings?
I think one way to do this is give it to them respectfully. Show them: “we took your work seriously and thus, we criticized it seriously. We held your work to the highest possible standards and it didn't quite make the highest possible standard although we thought it was very good. But we respect you by giving you honest criticism that you could learn from.”
Here, this next paragraph is dedicated to very sincere criticisms that result from having taken the work extremely seriously. So even though it's critical, I think the author of the story gets the feeling that their work was taken very seriously.
“The one criticism that kept coming up was that the story is too long. One person thought it could be shortened by as much as ten pages. Others were not so extreme, but agreed that editing would be helpful. Chief, for example, seems too minor a character to warrant the amount of attention he receives. The scenes with Joshua's mother also seemed to slow the momentum of the action (though also, the painted ceiling is a wonderful touch).”
That whole paragraph gives direct criticism of the writing that the author can benefit from. I think it softens the blow of the rejection to prove how seriously they took the work.
Part 5 – Closing
Finally, we get this closing, which again tries to pay back the face which has been lost in the rejection. This is more compliment. Sometimes one of the formulas for giving feedback is to put it in a sandwich, so you give a compliment, then you give the criticism, then you give another compliment. You sandwich the bad news in between two pieces of good news, or you sandwich the criticism in between two compliments. They sort of follow this strategy here, I think, to good effect.
“I hope these comments are in some way helpful to you. Let me also say – though it's probably small consolation…“
This is another empathetic statement. It says to the reader, “I know this won't console you because you really wanted this story to be accepted, not rejected.”
“I hope these comments are in some way helpful to you. Let me also say – though it's probably small consolation – that Wild Boar got as far as a story ever gets without actually appearing in the magazine.”
They basically said “your story came this close to getting published in our magazine, this close. It just didn't quite make it. The standard is here and your story just came right here,” which is supposed to be a compliment. I suppose it is, though it is small consolation because the author wanted his story to be accepted, not rejected.
“The magazine even went to Paris and back: George Clinton took it with him on his recent trip there.” George
Clinton was the editor of the Paris Review.
Then it ends with,
“Thanks again for sending it. I would be very happy to read anything else you have.”
Summary
So there you have it, a post on an effective way of writing a rejection letter.
If you have to ever write a rejection letter in your job, or if you have to reject people personally, I think they're important lessons to draw from this.
It starts with such class and empathy.
It takes the work seriously and gives valid criticism for the rejection.
Sometimes people get rejections and they don't even know why they didn't get the job, or they didn't get the prize or they didn't get their paper accepted, etc. You're just left with a blank rejection, and it's very defeating to get that.
Here, the rejection letter writer takes the work seriously. They end with even more compliments that the author is skillful, that the story made it almost into the paper and that they'd be willing to hear what he had in the future. So they sandwiched the criticism between these sort of other bits of good news. Of course in the beginning, they also issue the warning shot to allow the reader to prepare for the incoming bad news.
These, I think, are general principles for writing a rejection letter and can be used in lots of other kinds of interpersonal rejection as well, if you can abstract these principles and put them to work in other situations.
That's all for that letter. I just thought it was an excellent example. I'm going to fish around for some other examples from this meme about show me your rejections and we'll look at some bad rejections soon also. Those will be a little bit more humorous and examples of what not to do if you ever have to write a rejection letter.