A cover letter looks like a one-page business letter. Your name and contact details at the top, the date, the employer's details, a greeting, three or four short paragraphs, and a sign-off with your name. Left aligned, plenty of white space, done in under a page.

Most pages answering this question describe that layout in prose and stop. Describing a document is a poor way to show one, so this page does it the other way around: a complete cover letter first, with every part numbered, then the explanation of each part against that letter. Further down you'll see the same paragraphs written badly for comparison, and the same letter reshaped as an email and as a form-box entry, because those are the two other places your letter will actually live.

The example below is a project coordinator with four years at an architecture firm, applying for a project coordinator opening on a hospital network's facilities team. It's a realistic mid-level application: same job title, adjacent industry, and a letter that has to explain why construction-side coordination transfers to healthcare facilities. The numbers in the margin match the numbered breakdown that follows.

A cover letter looks like a one-page business letter: the same header as your resume, the date, the employer's details, a greeting to a named person where you can find one, three or four short paragraphs, and a sign-off with your name. Everything is left aligned, in the same font as your resume, with a blank line between blocks so the page breathes. If it runs past one page, it's too long. That's the whole visual answer; the rest of this page is about what goes inside those blocks, which is where letters are actually won or lost.

Nine parts, in the order they appear on the page. Each one has a job, and the example above shows what doing that job well looks like.

Layout is the easy part. The difference between a letter that gets read and one that gets skimmed and closed is in the sentences, so here is the same applicant's opening and first body paragraph written the way most people write them:

"I am writing to express my interest in the Project Coordinator position at your organization. I am a hard-working, detail-oriented professional with excellent communication skills and a proven track record of coordinating projects. I believe my background makes me a strong fit for this role, and I would welcome the opportunity to contribute to your team's continued success."

Nothing in that paragraph is false. It's also completely interchangeable: swap the job title and it applies to any coordinator opening in any industry, and every recruiter has read it a thousand times. Here's what separates it from the version in the example, difference by difference.

An AI chat tool can produce a competent draft in seconds, and there's nothing wrong with using one to get past the blank page. The problem is what those drafts contain: the tool doesn't know your submittal turnaround number or the tracker your office adopted, so it fills the space with exactly the kind of paragraph in the weak version above. Smooth, grammatical, and specific to nobody.

Readers notice, and not because they're running detection software. A letter that names nothing only you could name reads as generic regardless of who typed it, and generic is the failure. The fix isn't hiding the tool; it's feeding it proof only you have. Write down your three strongest specifics first, the way the example carries its three, then let a tool help with sentence-level polish. The cover letter prompt guide covers how to structure that if you go the chat-tool route.

The full business-letter layout is for the PDF you attach or upload. Paste that whole thing, address block and all, into an email or an application form and it looks like exactly what it is: a document dumped somewhere it doesn't belong. The paragraphs stay; the furniture changes.

When the letter is the email, the email's own fields replace the letterhead:

• Subject line: the job title and your name, plus the requisition number if there is one. "Application: Project Coordinator, Facilities – [Your Name]".
• No address block, no date. The email client already stamps both. Keeping them in the body is the most common giveaway of a pasted letter.
• Greeting and the same three or four paragraphs, unchanged.
• Sign-off, your name, then your phone number and email under the name, where the PDF's header used to carry them.

If you're attaching the letter as a PDF instead, the email itself needs only two or three lines saying what's attached and for which role.

Form boxes strip formatting and the applicant tracking system (ATS) already has your contact details, so the letter reduces to its core: greeting, the three or four paragraphs, sign-off, name. No header, no date, no employer block. Paste it, then read it once in the box, because line breaks sometimes vanish in transit and a wall of unbroken text undoes the white space you worked for.

Two questions people ask constantly, and the example answers both by existing. The four things every cover letter should include, with the label where each appears above: the specific job you're applying for (label 5, the opening), proof you can do what the posting asks (label 6, the proof paragraph), why this employer rather than any employer (label 7), and a clear ask for the next step (label 8, the closing).

The three golden rules are behaviors, not parts:

A good opening sentence does two jobs in one breath: it names the job and hands over your strongest fact. The example's first line works because it leads with the scale of what the applicant coordinates today rather than with enthusiasm about the opportunity. Two alternate openings the same applicant could use:

• "Cutting submittal review turnaround from ten working days to six is the kind of coordination problem I'd like to bring to the Project Coordinator role on your facilities team."
• "For the last four years I've kept twelve active architecture projects on schedule at once, and your Project Coordinator opening asks for exactly that kind of juggling."

Both name the job. Both carry a number. Neither says "I am writing to apply," which spends your most-read sentence stating the obvious.

You now know what the page should look like and, more usefully, what should be on it. The fastest path: write your three proof lines first, the specifics only you can claim, then build the letter around them in the order the labels above lay out. Pair it with a resume that carries the same header and the same evidence; the project coordinator resume example shows what that looks like for this same role.

Roleframe can draft a job-specific cover letter for you to edit, with your resume open beside it so the letter inherits the resume's theme and the headers match without any fiddling, and the finished PDF downloads free. If your situation needs a specific angle, the career change cover letter and the post-layoff cover letter show how the same structure flexes for harder stories.