#Letter endings how to

In this article, we discuss how to end a reference letter, provide examples to guide you and offer tips for writing your own. If you want to write an engaging and effective reference letter for a former employee, colleague or student, you may benefit from learning about the best ways to conclude your document. These letters are opportunities to promote the talents and positive character traits of a candidate and support them in gaining employment. With the above reservations in mind, I heartily recommend this work to anyone wishing to take seriously the literary context of Paul’s letters.A reference letter is a message that professionals write to recommend a candidate for a job. The danger in Weima’s thesis is that preceding themes may be read into Paul’s closing sections. the fact that clauses (and pericopes) semantically and syntactically develop from preceding clauses suggests that most epistolary closings (both modern and ancient) will cohere with the main body in some way. Consequently, I do not believe that Weima has proven his thesis through epistolary analysis the semantic relationships between Paul’s ‘closings’ and the body of the letter may be explained instead by the linear nature of all discourse, i.e. There is a lack of methodological clarity on Weima’s part concerning not only what the terms ‘echo’ and ‘summarize’ entail but also regarding the precise manner in which Paul differs from epistolary convention. 4:21–22) explicitly summarize the foregone letter. 54–55) in contrast, I find it difficult to see how Paul’s closing greetings ( e.g. One of his own epistolary examples, however, apparently echoes specific material ( e.g. The difference between Paul’s closings and conventional ones is supposedly that the latter summarize the main letter in only ‘general’ ways whereas Paul’s ‘echo specific material in the body’ (p. The second critique concerns his thesis that Paul’s closings summarize or echo preceding portions of the letter, more so than other epistolary closings do.

Consequently, the importance of the concept ‘closing’ to Weima’s study seems to warrant more theoretical definition. genre) or literary grounds are they based? Problematically, there is no precise formal distinction between the opening, body and closing thus, one might question their existence as structural elements in letters.

Are these modern labels, and if so, then on what linguistic ( i.e. The first concerns Weima’s failure to justify his use of the terms ‘opening’, ‘body’ and ‘closing’ to describe Paul’s letters. However, one serious flaw is the omission of dates for many of the epistolary examples-the date of a letter must be established before paralleling it with Paul’s style.Īlthough I readily recommend this work because it explicitly demonstrates the relevance of epistolary practices for interpreting Paul’s letters, I have two general criticisms. Chapter 5 is devoted to proving Weima’s thesis, namely that Paul’s closings summarize, encapsulate or echo the main portion of the letter.Įspecially profitable features of the book include (i) several tables of NT closing epistolary formulas, which allows for easy comparison, and (ii) an 18-page bibliography including many epistolary works. In chapters 4 and 5, Weima analyses Paul’s closing formulas (grace and peace benedictions, greeting, autograph, doxology, hortatory section, miscellaneous conventions), inspecting both their formal structure and cultural background (ch. Although his sources are relatively comprehensive, he fails to treat all of the Babatha correspondence. 3) letters: farewell wish, health wish, greeting, autograph, illiteracy formula, dating formula, signature and postscript. In chapters 2 and 3, Weima discusses closing conventions in Hellenistic (ch. Weima’s complaint, however, is that previous studies ‘fail to demonstrate how the Pauline letter closings relate in any significant way to the major concerns previously dealt with in the bodies of their respective letters’ (p. He suggests that there is a consensus on the basic structure of Paul’s letters: opening (sender, recipient, salutation) thanks-giving body (transitional formulas, autobiographical statements, concluding paraenesis, apostolic parousia) and closing (peace benediction, hortatory section, greeting, autograph, grace benediction). In chapter 1, Weima surveys various studies of NT letters. In his detailed analysis of Paul’s epistolary closings, Weima claims to have discovered a somewhat unique feature of Paul’s letters, namely, his closings summarize preceding themes in the letter. In this welcome study of Pauline letter closings, Jeffrey Weima has composed a single work which reflects several insights on epistolary closings previously published by various scholars ( e.g.

Letter endings