An Honest and Realistic Cover Letter

Dear Hiring Manager,

While my attached resume gives you a rundown of my career timeline, I’d like to take a moment to further explain why I would be an excellent candidate for the position of Staff Writer at your publication. As you will see, I have extensive experience writing, editing, and getting distracted by social media as early as 9 a.m. To illustrate, between the previous sentence and this one, I spent five minutes looking through a conversation my friends were having on Twitter and fretting about why I wasn’t included. Sometimes I feel like I was born for the job!

Throughout my career, my passion has been twofold: writing, and secretly Googling how to avoid getting wine teeth. To be honest, I did more of the latter at my previous position, which is why I made the decision to go freelance. The change has been extremely rewarding. In addition to my freelance work, I’m currently working to disrupt the concept of “business casual” by doing all my work in satin shorts with hearts on them from Fredericks of Hollywood and a stained cotton tank top. I’ve also learned a lot in my time as a freelancer. For instance, I’ve become an expert at creative lunch making, once creating an entire meal out of lentils and stale Saltines. I’ve also become adept at subtweeting, unnecessarily polishing silver, and planning hypothetical weddings.

Read the rest at The Billfold.