At TPII, we edit ALL academic documents. We are most famous for CVs and cover letters, but we do all the regular application documents (including not just the Research and Teaching Statements, but also the emergent Service Statement, as well as AI Policy Statement), we do grant and book proposals, and third year review and tenure and promotion statements.  Curious to know more? Email me at gettenure@gmail.com

Learn more here.

We also edit job talks.

(We also do live job talk sessions where I listen to your talk and comment and ask hard questions at the end! Learn about that here.)

Job talks are intense. The stakes are high, and misunderstanding about this genre of writing redounds.

In all of our work we do line by line, word by word, editing, but far more important than this detail work is  a much wider evaluation we provide of the appropriateness and viability of what you say and how you say it, and how it relates to the specific job ad, as well as your disciplinary norms (after 16 years, we know your norms).

And sometimes, especially for non-standard clients who may have come to the PhD late in life as a ‘second’ career, or who have worked outside of academia for some time, we have to undertake a wholesale instruction in a second language. By which I mean, teaching you — with very little time — how to write/speak “like an academic.”

The wild thing about academic norms is that the styles that work most effectively outside academia are the worst inside, and vice versa. In other words, casual, simple, accessible language – what you strive for in, say, the corporate world – sounds almost insultingly juvenile in an academic job talk. While the multi-syllabic, complex, hyper-articulated level of detail and sophistication, and also correct “posture” as a scholar that is required in the academic setting would come across as impossibly pretentious and alienating outside.

This translation work is very, very hard, especially when the stakes are high and the timeline is short.

So, I decided to share an anonymized version of comments I made recently on the job talk of a client who has worked in a non-profit research position for many years.  The client is a superb candidate for the job at hand, in part precisely because they’ve had some experience with their topic in corporate and non-profit settings, and finds themselves with fantastic research to share. But they are totally untrained (or actually, counter-trained) in the appropriately academic way to share it.

I think the email communicates the challenges better than any description. After all, it’s always best to “show, don’t tell.”

So here is what I responded. These comments of course accompanied the actual document filled with my more specific edits and comments. I can’t share those, as it would break confidentiality. But I think even this email verbiage communicates quite a bit.  As you can see, I pull no punches. When time is short and the stakes are high, nothing short of total candor will help. But my candor is always meant to teach. What I love about working with PhDs is how quickly and thoroughly they take direction and master writing and other technical skills. I have full confidence that the client will submit a second draft that does everything I ask, and be editable into an effective job talk.

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“Hi XX, I edited what i could but halfway through realized you’d sent an incomplete mss filled with random fragments, incoherent notes to self, comments that i couldn’t follow, as well as verbiage that made no sense. So please send back a complete draft for our second edit.

The talk fell apart in the substance of the first project. I began trying to rephrase your writing in properly scholarly language to provide you examples (ie not just yell at your for what’s wrong, but also teach you how to fix it!). Only to realize, that your writing made no sense to me. I could not follow your claims (I explain further in the comments). And so I could not rewrite them. I am confident this is not a result of my coming from a different discipline, as our fields are quite close, and your methods are very familiar to an anthropologist, but rather that you have misjudged what specifics of your project (which you know inside and out) need to be foregrounded for an audience encountering the work for the first time.

In the parts I COULD edit, there are both large and small errors throughout. Smaller errors are trite, hackneyed phrases and idioms (“take the wheel,” “do more with less,” etc.), over-casual and over-conversational language, insufficiently sophisticated descriptions and explanations (that read like freshman lectures), use of “we” when a job talk must rest on “I,” and a bad case of redundancy. I note where you repeat yourself. Remove all that.

Middle level errors are a habit of passive voice that obscures the actual agents and actors, sloppy attributions (“Seattle” cannot make a request, for ex; a city is not an agent), and chronological descriptions of research. Re the latter: Read a journal article and notice: research is almost NEVER described chronologically, ie, “first we did, then we did, then we noticed, and so then we did…” Rather it is often in present tense, and presented as a whole: “the work is based on an analysis of xx. The analyses hinges on a definition of xx as yy. Using AA and BB methods allows a breakdown of multiple factors such as pp and qq.”

It doesn’t HAVE to be present tense throughout, of course. I can see why past tense might be necessary at moments.  You can say, “focusing on pp and qq allowed me to identify XX as the primary factor impacting yy.” But the point is, NONE of it is presented as a step by step chronological unfolding. That sounds insufficiently formal for the job talk genre, and also carries a feeling of inexperience… as if you were a grad student explaining your process to your committee, anticipating criticism. Not the proper mode for a job talk.

Large errors are the defensive over-emphasis on your team colleagues and the details of their work (totally inappropriate for the job talk genre, as this has obscured and undermined your centrality. BTW, this is also very gendered), and then a peculiar dynamic where you gloss over the really important SCHOLARLY content with minimal detail (ie the detail we actually need to make sense of your project) while over-explaning content we do NOT need to know, like the tangential conference you organized. (Conferences don’t get mentioned in job talks).

The fact is, XX, your instincts are 180 degrees reversed. Everything that would be good in your day job (and I 100% recognize that indeed these habits ARE good in your non-academic/corporate day job) is bad here, and vice versa. I will be happy to give you examples of better language when I can, but I need a complete and far more polished mss to have the verbiage to be able to do it. In other words, I’m not expecting perfection from you – I do understand that you need my help and i want to give it! – but I am expecting coherence… Right now we don’t have coherence. Pls do all the things I said in comments and send back labeled Draft2.”