Writing a cover letter gets difficult when you try to make it impressive.
People start adding formal introductions, long descriptions of their background and claims about being passionate, motivated or results-driven. By the time the useful information appears, the person reading the application may already have moved on.
A good cover letter is much simpler. It gives the reader enough context to understand why your experience fits this particular piece of work.
For a regular job application, that means connecting your background to the role and company. For freelance work, it usually means showing that you understand the project and have relevant experience to handle it.
The format changes slightly, but the basic principle stays the same. The reader should not have to work hard to understand why you are worth considering.
Read the job description before writing anything
Generic cover letters are usually generic because the person starts with their own background instead of the job.
Read the description once without writing.
Then read it again and identify the few things the employer or client appears to care about most.
A marketing job may mention paid social, reporting and campaign management several times. A freelance development project may spend most of the brief explaining an existing Shopify problem. A design role may care more about presentations than branding.
Those priorities should influence the letter.
You do not need to mention every requirement. Focus on the ones where your experience gives you something useful to say.
This also stops the cover letter from becoming a shorter version of your CV. The CV contains your history. The letter selects the parts of that history that matter for this application.
That distinction is consistent with Oxford Careers guidance on cover letters, which recommends using the letter to highlight relevant strengths and motivation rather than simply repeating information already available on the CV.
Start with the reason you are relevant
Many cover letters begin with some variation of:
“I am writing to express my interest in the position of…”
There is nothing technically wrong with that sentence. It just uses valuable space to tell the reader something they already know.
A better opening gets into the application itself.
For example:
I have spent the past two years managing email and paid social campaigns for small ecommerce brands, so the combination of campaign planning and performance reporting in this role caught my attention.
That opening gives the reader useful information immediately.
For freelance work, the opening can be even more direct:
I recently rebuilt a similar Shopify checkout flow for a small retailer, including the subscription and mobile issues you mentioned in the brief.
There is no need for a dramatic hook.
You are not writing an advertisement. You are helping someone quickly connect your experience with a problem they already need solved.
Make the middle of the letter about evidence
Most weak cover letters rely too heavily on adjectives.
Applicants describe themselves as hardworking, organised, detail-oriented, creative or excellent communicators. The problem is that anybody can use the same words.
Evidence gives those claims weight.
Instead of saying you are good at project management, explain that you coordinated a website launch involving two designers, three developers and a six-week deadline.
Instead of describing yourself as an experienced social media marketer, mention the type of accounts you managed and what you were responsible for.
The evidence does not always need an impressive number attached to it. Specific responsibility can be convincing on its own.
Someone who says, “I managed weekly customer newsletters for a 40,000-subscriber list” gives the reader something concrete.
Someone who says, “I am highly experienced in email marketing” leaves the reader to decide what highly experienced means.
Numbers help when they add real context, but they should not be forced into every sentence.
Choose one or two examples rather than telling your entire career story
A cover letter is too short to contain everything you have done.
Trying to include every relevant job, qualification, project and skill usually makes the important experience harder to see.
Choose the strongest examples for that application.
If a role requires client management and reporting, an example showing both may be more valuable than three paragraphs covering unrelated responsibilities.
The same rule applies when you have been working for years. Seniority does not require a longer autobiography.
Your CV or portfolio can carry the detail.
The cover letter should make the reader interested enough to look at them.
Harvard’s career guidance similarly recommends keeping cover letters concise, factual and generally within one page while connecting experience directly to the requirements of the role.
Explain the connection instead of expecting the reader to make it
People sometimes list good experience without explaining why it is relevant.
Imagine a company wants someone who can manage customer research.
An applicant writes:
At my previous company, I worked in customer success for two years.
That might be relevant, but the reader has to make the connection.
A slightly fuller version works better:
I spent two years in customer success, where I regularly interviewed customers about onboarding problems and turned recurring feedback into product notes for our development team.
Now the relationship to customer research is obvious.
This becomes particularly important when you are moving between industries or roles.
Your previous job title may not match the position you are applying for, but parts of the work may transfer very well.
Spell that out.
Cover letters with little experience need better examples, not more apologies
Students and people changing careers often weaken their own applications by repeatedly pointing out what they have not done.
They mention that they are new, lack professional experience or have never held exactly the same title.
The person reviewing the application can see your work history. There is no need to keep drawing attention to it.
Use the experience you do have.
University projects, internships, volunteering, personal work, student organisations and independent projects can all demonstrate relevant skills when they are genuine.
A student applying for a marketing role may have managed promotion for a university society. Someone moving into development may have working software projects even without a previous developer job.
Students looking for paid experience can also use our guide to online jobs that work around college to find areas where academic and personal skills can become useful work.
Keep the description accurate. A personal project should not suddenly become professional client experience.
You are showing what you can do, not trying to make your history look longer than it is.
A freelance cover letter works differently
Traditional cover letters and freelance proposals share a name, but the reader is often making a different decision.
An employer may be choosing someone to join a company for years.
A freelance client may simply need a website fixed by Friday.
That usually means the freelance version should get to the project faster.
On Upwork and similar marketplaces, a cover letter is effectively the proposal message attached to your application. The client may be comparing several freelancers for one clearly defined problem, so a long explanation of your entire career can work against you.
Upwork’s current guidance recommends keeping most proposals brief and tailoring them to the project rather than sending the same text repeatedly.
A useful freelance proposal often contains four things naturally within a few short paragraphs:
- A clear reference to the actual project.
- Relevant experience or a closely related example.
- A brief explanation of how you would approach the work.
- A sensible next step.
You do not need to label those parts.
The proposal should still read like a message from one person to another.
If you are just beginning independent work, our guide on how to start freelancing and get your first clients covers the wider process beyond the proposal itself.
Show work when the work can be shown
A portfolio often does more than another paragraph about your skills.
Designers, writers, developers, marketers, photographers, editors and other freelancers should use relevant samples when possible.
Relevant is the important word.
If a client needs an ecommerce landing page, send an ecommerce or conversion-focused example if you have one. Your beautifully designed restaurant menu may be good work, but it does not answer the client’s immediate concern.
The same applies to regular job applications.
A role that involves writing may justify linking to a small portfolio. A developer can include GitHub or a project site where appropriate. Someone applying for a presentation-design role can show a carefully selected deck.
Avoid making the reader sort through everything you have ever created.
A few closely related examples make the decision easier.
Research enough to become specific
Personalisation does not mean finding the hiring manager’s favourite football team.
Useful research concerns the work.
Look at the company’s product, customers, recent work and the wording of the role. For freelance projects, read the entire brief and check any material the client provides.
Then use what is genuinely relevant.
For a job application, you might refer to a product area that connects directly with your experience.
For a freelance proposal, you could mention that the client’s existing site uses a technology you have worked with before.
This sounds more natural than adding the company name to a generic paragraph about how much you admire its values.
There is a simple test for this. Replace the company name with another company.
If almost the entire cover letter still works unchanged, it probably needs more specific thinking.
Keep the length proportional to the decision
There is no prize for filling the page.
A standard job cover letter usually has enough room for three or four useful paragraphs. Oxford recommends keeping a conventional cover letter to no more than one side of A4 unless the organisation asks for something different.
Freelance proposals are often shorter because the scope is narrower.
A client hiring someone to edit five videos does not need the same background explanation as an employer hiring a permanent head of marketing.
Use enough space to make the case and stop when the useful information runs out.
Long sentences deserve the same scrutiny. If you have put three different ideas into one sentence, separating them will usually make the letter easier to read.
Match the tone to the organisation
Professional does not have to mean stiff.
A cover letter for a law firm will probably sound different from an application to a small design studio. A proposal to a startup founder may be less formal than a letter sent through a graduate recruitment programme.
Look at how the organisation communicates.
The wording of the job description is often a useful clue.
You do not need to imitate the company’s voice, but your application should not feel as though it was written for a completely different environment.
Avoid slang when you do not know the reader, and avoid formality that makes normal sentences sound unnatural.
“To whom it may concern, I hereby wish to submit my candidacy” is not more professional than clear English.
Be careful when using AI to write the letter
AI can help with editing, but it is particularly easy to detect when an applicant has allowed it to make every writing decision.
The result often sounds polished without saying much.
Phrases about being uniquely positioned, bringing a proven track record, leveraging expertise or driving meaningful impact appear because they can fit almost any application.
That is precisely the problem.
If you use an AI tool, give it your actual experience and the job description rather than asking for a cover letter from scratch. Use it to find repetition, shorten a paragraph or identify requirements you may have missed.
Then rewrite the result in language you would genuinely use.
Do not let the tool invent metrics, responsibilities or experience. A polished claim that did not happen is still a false claim.
Your cover letter also acts as a writing sample. If you reach an interview and communicate completely differently from the application, the contrast can become obvious.
Remove the sentences that are only taking up space
Editing a cover letter is often more valuable than adding another paragraph.
Read it once specifically looking for information the employer already has.
You can usually remove sentences explaining that you found the position advertised, that your CV is attached or that you believe your skills make you suitable when the next paragraph already demonstrates those skills.
Look for vague claims as well.
“I believe I would make a valuable contribution to your organisation” tells the reader almost nothing.
The space is better used showing the contribution you have made somewhere else.
Reading the letter aloud is useful because awkward corporate language becomes easier to notice when you have to say it.
Check names, role titles and company names separately at the end. These are small mistakes with an outsized ability to make an application look careless.
A complete cover letter example
Here is a simple example for someone applying for a content marketing role.
Dear Maya,
I saw that the role combines long-form content with customer research, which is close to the work I have been doing for the past two years at a small B2B software company.
I currently plan and write our educational content, including product guides, customer stories and comparison pages. The part I have enjoyed most is working directly with customers and our sales team to understand which questions keep coming up, then turning those questions into articles the team can actually use. One recent content series became our sales team’s standard follow-up material for new trial users.
Your focus on helping small finance teams adopt the product is particularly relevant to me because much of my current work involves explaining software to readers who are not technical. I have included two writing samples that show that approach, including one based on customer interviews.
I would be glad to talk through the role and learn more about what your team wants the content programme to accomplish this year.
Best,
Alex
The example works because it does not attempt to sound impressive in every sentence. It gives the reader relevant experience, enough detail to judge it and a reason the applicant is interested in this particular role.
A shorter freelance proposal example
Freelance work can usually get to the point more quickly.
Hi Daniel,
I have worked on two recent Shopify projects involving subscription checkout issues, including one where mobile customers were being sent back to the cart after selecting a plan.
I would start by reproducing the problem across the devices and payment methods you mentioned, then trace whether it is coming from the theme, subscription app or checkout configuration. I can send you the findings before making changes so we agree on the fix first.
I have included a similar Shopify project in my portfolio. I am available to start tomorrow if the timing works for you.
Sam
There is no long introduction and no list of every technology Sam knows.
The proposal stays close to the client’s problem.
That is usually where the strongest cover letters end up after editing. They contain less general information and more evidence that belongs specifically in that application.