[OkayPhysicist]

Most effective cover letter I ever experimented with was a simple preamble expressing interest in the company and the particular position (2-3 sentences, just enough to demonstrate basic eloquence), followed by "In the sake of brevity, here's a T-chart matching my qualifications to your requirements:" where I put in a T-chart pairing most of the bullet points in the job posting with a description of the skills I had. Since most of the requirements were similar between multiple job postings, I had LaTeX shortcuts to reference a pre-made pile of qualification statements. Took me about 5 minutes to hammer out, and definitely improved my rate of receiving responses by about a factor of 2.