Writing a Cover Letter in Microsoft Word

A cover letter is a simpler document than a resume and people still get the layout wrong, usually by importing habits from essay writing. Ten minutes of setup fixes it permanently.

Block format, part by part

Everything left aligned. No centring, no indents.

1. Your name, slightly larger and bold.
2. Your contact line: city and state, phone, email, separated by dots.
3. A blank line, then the date.
4. A blank line, then the recipient block: name, title, organisation. Street address optional if you are emailing.
5. A blank line, then the salutation, with a comma or a colon.
6. The body, with a blank line between paragraphs and no indents.
7. A blank line, then the sign-off.
8. Your typed name.

That is the whole structure. Purdue’s cover letter guidance follows the same conventions, and there is no advantage in deviating from them.

The letterhead that matches your resume

Small effort, visible payoff. If your resume header uses your name at 20 point bold with a contact line beneath, use exactly the same block on the letter.

Two documents that look like a set signal care in a way nobody consciously notices and everybody registers. Two documents in different fonts look assembled from different sources, which is often what happened.

The simplest way to guarantee it: copy the header block from your resume into your letter document rather than retyping it.

Set up styles once

The same discipline that keeps a resume tidy, applied to a shorter document.

Microsoft documents customising or creating styles. For a letter you need three:

• Name, matching your resume.
• Contact line, matching your resume.
• Body, at 11 or 12 point, single spaced, with 10 to 12 points of space after each paragraph.

That third one matters most. Setting space after the paragraph is what produces even gaps between paragraphs. Pressing Enter twice produces gaps whose height depends on the empty paragraph’s font size, which is why hand-formatted letters have inconsistent spacing.

Save the result as your own template so every future letter starts correct.

The settings to get right

• Margins one inch all round. A letter has less content than a resume, so there is no reason to crowd it.
• Alignment left, not justified. Justified text in a short letter creates uneven word spacing.
• Line spacing single, with space after paragraphs. Not 1.5, which makes a 250-word letter look padded.
• Font the same as your resume, at 11 or 12 point.
• Hyphenation off.
• Colour near-black. Grey body text is harder to read than it looks.
• No page numbers, headers or footers. A one-page letter needs none of them.

Keep it to one page, comfortably

At around 250 words in 11 point with one inch margins, a letter occupies roughly half a page. That is correct and it should look deliberate rather than sparse.

Three things make a short letter look intentional: consistent paragraph spacing, a letterhead that fills the top properly, and paragraphs of similar length. A letter with one two-line paragraph and one nine-line paragraph looks unbalanced regardless of content.

If your letter is running past one page, the problem is content rather than layout. See the cover letter length guide.

Export and send

Use Word’s own PDF export, which Microsoft documents for saving or converting to PDF, rather than printing to an image.

Send PDF by default. The reason is specific: if you send a Word file and the recipient lacks your font, Word substitutes another, line breaks move, and a comfortable one-page letter can spill a line onto a second page. PDF removes that entirely.

Send .docx only when asked, which happens most often with recruitment agencies who want to edit before forwarding.

Name the file so a stranger can file it: CoverLetter-Wieczorek-Vance.pdf.

Before you send

1. Check the company name and the recipient’s name. Both. This is where reused letters betray themselves.
2. Search the document for any leftover text from the previous version.
3. Run the Document Inspector to clear author details and any tracked changes.
4. Confirm the font matches your resume.
5. Export to PDF and open it to check the page count.

Point one is not a formality. Sending a letter naming the wrong employer is the single most common fatal error in cover letters, and it happens to organised people applying at volume.

Related

For tailoring and reuse in Word, see Word cover letter tips. For the Google alternative, see the Google Docs cover letter guide. For content, see the cover letter outline guide and the best cover letter examples. For the matching resume, see the Microsoft Word resume guide.

Or skip the setup with the cover letter generator, free at Kazifi.