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The research statement that you include in your promotion and tenure dossier is one of the most important documents of your scholarly career—and one you’ll have little experience writing or even reading, unless you have a generous network of senior colleagues. As an academic editor, I support a half dozen or so academics each year as they revise (and re-revise, and throw out, and retrieve from the bin, and re-revise again) and submit their research statements and P&T dossiers. My experience is with—and so these recommendations are directed at—tenure-track researchers at American R-1s and R-2s and equivalent Canadian and Australian institutions.

In my experience, most academics are good at describing what their research is and how and why they do it, but

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