Lexicon of Internationally Ambiguous Recommendations

More about the book

When your desire to write a polite recommendation letter stands in the way of telling the truth, turn to The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations and you can do both. Each positive-sounding remark about a person's work ethic, personality, or brains can have a hidden meaning thanks to tricky phrasing and questionable punctuation. Robert J. Thornton's manual of double-edged recommendations helps you do your part and leaves it to the new employer to interpret your comments as praise or criticism. (Does "She works without direction" mean that she works independently or that she's disorganized?) With this book, you'll never feel that you brushed over an employee's failings or that you damaged a reputation. The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations is a handy way to create truthful descriptions guaranteed to amuse you, appease former employees, and let new employers draw their own conclusions. Robert J. Thornton is a professor of economics at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Over the years, he has lost much sleep worrying how to write fitting letters of recommendation. His colleagues at Lehigh have grown weary listening to him talk about the subject, however, and wish he would get a life. For obvious reasons, he seldom is asked to write letters of recommendation anymore, and he is deathly afraid to ask anyone to write one for him.