Analysis of a collection of contemporary recommendation letters for admission to a PhD program inEnglish studies revealed differences in length, level of specificity, and rhetorical appeals that applied much more strongly to candidates' acceptance status than to gender. Across both status and gender groupings, however, candidates were frequently appraised through economic metaphors, indicating a disciplinary culture that dually approaches graduate students as immediate sources of labor and as the future of the profession. Findings from these letters should promote continued conversation about disciplinary culture and clearer guidelines for those writing and requesting recommendation letters.Letter-writing represents an enormous and long literary tradition tracing back to the Ars Dictaminis manuals of the Middle Ages and before; the academic letter of recommendation as a specific subgenre, however, has been explored by only a handful of scholars. 1 These studies have focused most frequently on cross-cultural differences (Bouton; Precht) and gender coding (Lunneborg and Lillie; Bell et al.; Cowan and Kasen; Trix et al.; and Watson). Collections of letters under study have tended to come from the social sciences (Lunneborg and Lillie; Watson), law (Precht), and medicine (Trix and Psenka). 2 What makes an analysis of recommendation letters from English studies particularly promising is that the recommenders, who by and large also come from departments of English, are themselves students of language. While authorial intention is impossible (and perhaps unproductive) to prove, it