This paper presents the results of a genre analysis of the summative editorial letter—the letter that journal editors write to authors when sending out reviews and giving their decision regarding publication. Following the methodology developed by Swales and Bhatia, 53 letters written by a co‐editor of a leading Applied Linguistics journal were examined in terms of their schematic structure and linguistic and politeness strategies. Based upon this analysis, it is concluded that there may be difficulties in interpretation due to a lack of clarity in the schematic structuring of some of the letters and the use of face‐saving strategies on the part of the editor when presenting criticisms and suggestions for revision. Given that the study is based on the letters of one editor, no generalizations can be made. However, the study provides a baseline from which future studies can be measured. As such it increases our knowledge of the academic genres.