Query letter: art or science?So a writer friend who is about to submit to agents asked me to check out her query letter for her today. While I was looking at the query letter, my dad called and asked me what I was up to. "I'm helping a friend with a query letter," I told him. "Why does she need help?" he wanted to know."It's harder than it sounds, Dad.""I don't know. I think I could write one.""You're an engineer, Dad," I said sadly. "Real writers struggle with this.""Well," said my dad, who is a practitioner of the religion of Spreadsheet, "I think all you have to do is put the most important stuff at the beginning.""Huhn." Huhn."I'm not sure I ever told you," he went on, "but back when I was in college, they made all us engineers take a writing class.""Why?""I don't know. I guess they didn't want us to not get jobs because we couldn't communicate enough to fill out the job application.""Fair enough.""Well, in this writing class, they taught us that you have to always be able to chop off the end of whatever you've written, and still have it stand on its own. If you're writing a newspaper article, you never know if they're going to decide to shorten a column after you've written it. If you're writing an essay or a business proposal or a letter, you never know when someone's going to lose interest or stop reading, so you need to say all the important things in the beginning." "Huhn." Huhn. I really, really didn't want him to be right or knowledgeable about this, but I couldn't in good faith argue with him. "So," he concluded, "that's what I do if I were writing a query letter for a book. I'd just start with what was most important right off the bat, and then go to the second most important stuff, etc.""Well, Dad, maybe you should write a book so you can write a query letter for it.""No, I don't think so. I think the rules for writing a book are different."So what do you think, agents? Would you take an engineer-style query letter?