Once upon a time I was in a PhD program in linguistics. Which means I spent a lot of time doing a lot of analyses on different types of language. For one of my class projects I looked specifically at query letters. I identified two linguistic distinctions between query letters that were successful and query letters that were unsuccessful. I was pretty interested in what I found and wanted to share. A little linguistic theory There are two linguistic theories that are relevant here. First, is that language is used for a purpose and the type of language used is a reflection of that purpose. Which is why an academic…