Short cover letter examples: 120 words that do the job

A short cover letter is four to six sentences: the role, two or three duties from the posting you have actually done, one detail that proves it, and a specific next step. Both letters below come in under 120 words, and neither one is a long letter that got trimmed.

That distinction is the whole post. A short letter is a different document, built from a shorter list of claims — and the paragraph you delete to get there is the first one, not the second.

The Bookkeeper letter, in full

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am applying for the Bookkeeper role at [Company]. For four years I have run month-end close for a 40-person company: reconciling bank transactions, processing payroll twice a month, and preparing the trial balance our CPA signs. I work in QuickBooks every day and rebuild the AP aging in Excel when the standard report does not answer the question I have.

Your posting says this seat closes the books without supervision. That is the part I already do.

I can send a sample close checklist if it would be useful.

Sincerely, [Your name]

Four years, forty people, twice-monthly payroll: those are placeholders, and yours go in their place. What is not a placeholder is the middle sentence, which names three duties in a row and then stops.

Where every sentence came from

None of that letter was invented. O*NET publishes 28 tasks for Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks — the federal occupation that "Bookkeeper" sits inside — written in the vocabulary employers already use. The letter borrows four of them, closely enough that a hiring manager who wrote the posting from the same source hears their own req coming back.

Every claim in the Bookkeeper letter, and the O*NET task under it

Four of the 28 published tasks for 43-3031.00. The letter names them and stops; the resume carries the rest.

	The sentence says	The task list says
Claim 1	reconciling bank transactions	Reconcile records of bank transactions.
Claim 2	processing payroll twice a month	Prepare and process payroll information.
Claim 3	preparing the trial balance our CPA signs	Prepare trial balances of books.
Claim 4	I work in QuickBooks every day	Operate computers programmed with accounting software to record, store, and analyze information.

QuickBooks and Excel are not decoration either. O*NET flags both Intuit QuickBooks and Microsoft Excel as in-demand technologies for this occupation, so naming them costs four words and buys a match on the two tools most likely to appear in the posting. Further down the same technology list are SAP Concur, flagged as a hot technology, and Sage 50, flagged as neither. If one of those is the tool named in the req, it replaces QuickBooks in your version of the sentence and nothing else changes.

Look up the occupation, not just the posting

The posting tells you what one employer wants. The occupation tells you what the job is called everywhere else, which is what you need when the posting runs to four vague bullets and a paragraph about culture.

"Bookkeeper" maps to O*NET code 43-3031.00, whose reported job titles include Accounting Clerk, Accounting Specialist, Accounts Payable Clerk and Accounting Technician. "UX Designer" maps to 15-1255.00, reported as UI Developer, UX Developer, UX Engineer, Web Designer and Webmaster. Those synonym lists are worth two minutes of your time on their own: if the req uses a title you would not have searched for, the tasks underneath it are still the ones you know.

The two codes also sit in different preparation tiers, and that changes the letter more than the word count does. O*NET puts Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks in Job Zone Three, medium preparation, with 41 percent of surveyed workers reporting a high school diploma as the requirement. Web and Digital Interface Designers sit in Job Zone Four, considerable preparation, where 52 percent reported a bachelor's degree. In a Job Zone Four letter you can write "moderated sessions every sprint" and assume the reader knows what that means. In a Job Zone Three letter, where the reader may be the office manager rather than a specialist, "reconciling bank transactions" beats any piece of internal jargon your last employer used for the same work.

The UX Designer letter, in full

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am applying for the UX Designer role at [Company]. Most of the last two years has been user research and the redesigns that came out of it: moderated sessions every sprint, a component library documented in Figma, and a checkout flow rebuilt after testing showed people quitting at the address step.

Your posting lists accessibility as a requirement rather than a nice-to-have. I have shipped against WCAG AA twice, and I can tell you what it changed about the designs.

I would be glad to walk through the checkout work, including the version that failed.

Sincerely, [Your name]

Same shape, different source list. The federal occupation covering UX Designer is Web and Digital Interface Designers, and O*NET publishes 31 tasks for it — among them "Conduct user research to determine design requirements and analyze user feedback to improve design quality" and "Develop and document style guidelines for Web site content." The first paragraph is those two tasks in the first person, with something that happened attached to each. Figma appears in that occupation's technology list, which is why it is in the letter and Sketch is not.

The accessibility sentence does a job the Bookkeeper letter has no equivalent for. O*NET's twenty-first task for this occupation asks the designer to incorporate "legal issues including accessibility and privacy" into design plans, and postings increasingly promote that line from the middle of the duty list to a stated requirement. When a posting does that, the promoted duty has earned its own sentence — even in a letter this short, and even at the cost of a claim you would otherwise have made about your portfolio.

Two letters, side by side

The two counts land close together because the format is fixed. What changes between one occupation and another is which duties get named — not how many, and not how long the letter runs.

Does a short letter look lazy?

It looks fast, which is a different thing. Write as though the reader gets two sentences in before deciding whether to finish — nobody publishes that number, so treat it as the conservative assumption rather than a finding, and notice that a letter built on it loses nothing if the reader turns out to be more patient. The letter that reads as lazy is the 300-word one from a Bookkeeper applicant that still has not said whether they have ever closed a month.

What the Bookkeeper numbers say, and what they do not

Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks

1,532,400Employed, 2025

$50,670Median annual wage, May 2025

-6%Projected change, 2025–35

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 1,532,400 bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks in 2025, with a median wage, as of May 2025, of $50,670 a year, or $24.36 an hour. It projects the occupation to shed 85,600 jobs between 2025 and 2035, a six percent decline. Typical entry-level education is "some college, no degree", and among the workers O*NET surveyed, 41 percent said a high school diploma was what the job required.

Here is what those numbers do not tell you: none of them says how many people apply per opening, whether anyone reads the cover letter, or whether a short letter outperforms a long one. BLS publishes employment and wages. It does not publish hiring behavior, and no public source does at the level of an individual application.

What the decline does tell you is narrower and more useful. Postings for this title now describe a smaller job than they did a decade ago, because accounting software absorbed most of the keying — so the duties worth spending your four claims on are the judgment ones. Reconciling. Preparing a trial balance. Catching a miscoded entry before the close. Not "data entry", which is the duty most likely to have been automated at the employer you are writing to.

The same logic runs the other way for the designer. BLS puts the May 2025 median for web and digital interface designers at $104,000, against $92,650 for web developers in the same handbook entry — two titles, one occupation group, a gap of more than eleven thousand dollars. If your letter is aimed at the design half, the research and the style-guide work are the claims that place you there. Naming the front-end framework you also know is what places you in the other half.

Cutting a 400-word letter down to 120

Most people arrive at this with a letter already written — 400 words aimed at a Bookkeeper opening, half of it about the company — so the practical question is what to delete. Order matters, because the instinct is to trim adjectives evenly out of every paragraph, and that produces a 300-word letter that still says nothing.

How to cut a long cover letter to 120 words

Delete whole paragraphs before you edit sentences. The order is deliberate.

1. 1
   Delete the opening paragraph

   The one saying you were excited to see the posting and believe you would be a strong fit. It is throat-clearing. Replace the whole thing with one sentence naming the role.

2. 2
   Delete the company-research paragraph

   Unless you have a specific reason to keep it — you have used the product, you know the team's work — the mission sentence is the most interchangeable thing in the letter.

3. 3
   Keep the duties paragraph, shorten each claim to one clause

   This is the only paragraph a reader cannot get from your resume. Three duties, comma-separated, with one concrete detail attached to the strongest.

4. 4
   Cut every adjective you applied to yourself

   Detail-oriented, passionate, results-driven, self-starter. Nothing about them can be checked, so they carry no information. The duties imply them anyway.

5. 5
   Replace the closing with a specific offer

   Not a line about looking forward to hearing from them. Name the one thing you would walk them through: a close checklist, a redesign, a report you built.

Steps one and two do most of the work on their own, because in a long letter those two paragraphs are usually the longest two. The rest is arithmetic.

The lines to delete first

Each of these turns up in most long letters, costs you a sentence, and survives no scrutiny. They go before anything else does:

• "I was excited to see your posting for the Bookkeeper position on your careers page." The reader knows where the posting is.
• "I am a detail-oriented professional with a passion for accuracy." Unfalsifiable, and every applicant for this job writes it.
• "As you can see from my attached resume…" They can see it. Say something the resume does not.
• "I have long admired your company's commitment to innovation." True of any company, written by someone who has not looked at this one.
• "I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my skills and experience align with your needs." Sixteen words that resolve to "call me."

That is the only list in this post, and it is a list because these five items have nothing in common except the delete key.

When 120 words is the wrong call

Three cases. A career change, where the letter has to argue that the previous job is relevant at all: an Accounting Clerk applying for a Bookkeeper seat does not need that argument, because O*NET files both titles under the same code, but a classroom teacher applying for the same seat does. An internal application, where the reader already knows your work and the letter is about the step up rather than the qualifications. And a posting that asks for something specific — a writing sample, an answer to a question, a stated length — where the instruction outranks any advice here.

In those three the letter is doing work the resume cannot do, and 120 words is not enough room to do it. Even then the extra length belongs to one paragraph, not spread across four: a career-change letter is a short letter with an argument bolted onto the middle of it, and it should still open by naming the role in a single sentence.

Everywhere else, length was never the constraint. Finding four duties you can defend for ten minutes under questioning is.

What to do this week

Open the cover letter you are sending right now and delete the first paragraph. Read what is left. If it still makes sense — and it nearly always does — that paragraph was carrying nothing, and it was the first thing anyone read.

Then look your target title up on O*NET and read the task list end to end. Pick the three tasks you have genuinely done, write each as a clause in the first person, and hang one concrete detail on the strongest of the three. A UX Designer working from a 31-task list needs three of them. A Bookkeeper working from 28 needs three, plus the software line, which costs four words and is the one claim in either letter a keyword filter can match on its own.

Last, save the result as one file and stop rewriting it for every application. The duties paragraph changes when the posting changes; nothing else does. If you would rather not retype that letter and the same six contact fields into every form, HeroApply fills the application from your resume and leaves you the one paragraph that actually varies.