Faculty and Tenure Applicants Editing and Proofreading Services

A committee reads sixty applications in two evenings. What they are trying to decide is not whether you are good — the shortlist is all good — but whether your work is going somewhere, and whether the next five years will produce funded projects, graduate students and papers in this department. Your research statement is the only document that answers that, and most research statements are a summary of what has already happened.

We work on what academic job and tenure candidates write — research statements and their trajectory, teaching statements and evidence of practice, cover letters for specific posts, tenure and promotion dossiers and narratives, contribution and impact statements, diversity and service statements, funding track record and pipeline descriptions, publication list framing and annotation, external reviewer letters where candidates draft the brief, and interview and presentation material. Our editors work on the statement that has to describe a future.

The research statement's trajectory is what separates a shortlist from an offer, and its failure is a chronological account of completed work. A committee can see your publications; what they cannot see is the shape they make and what comes next. We work through these so the statement opens with the question your work as a whole is answering, since three separate projects with no connecting question read as three separate projects; so the past work is presented as steps in that argument rather than in the order it happened, because chronology is the author's structure and the argument is the reader's; so the next five years are described as specific projects with what would be needed to do them — the funding scheme, the collaboration, the equipment, the students — given that a committee is assessing feasibility as much as ambition; so the funding pipeline is stated with what has been submitted, what is planned and to which schemes, as this is the paragraph a head of department reads most carefully; so the fit with the department is specific about people and facilities rather than complimentary about reputation, since every candidate says the department is excellent; so the risky element is named with what happens if it does not work, because a statement with no risk reads as unambitious and one with no fallback reads as unrealistic; and so the whole thing is written to be read in four minutes. Statements written this way get discussed rather than sorted.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including applications, unpublished work and dossiers. We are editors rather than academic advisers or search committee members, and we offer no view on your research, your prospects or your case. What we can do is make the trajectory visible in four minutes.