Job Market Writing Samples, Part II

I talked about some aspects of writing a job market writing sample here. In that post, I emphasized the ways in which a writing sample is different from a paper aimed at publication. Today, I want to talk about one of the points of correspondence between them.

One of the tasks the writing sample is supposed to perform is to show off your research potential. At many schools, publication record is a central component of professional success. Some schools certainly put some weight on teaching, but that alone won’t get it done. So your writing sample needs to go at least part of the way towards convincing people that you’re going to produce a nice stream of publications.

In order to have a paper accepted for publication, it doesn’t just need to have the intrinsic values of a paper—a thesis, good arguments, etc. It also needs to make a contribution to the literature. Nobody is going to publish a paper that just makes the same points, in the same way, as another published paper. (Well, actually, it happens. But it’s not a good strategy to bet your publication record on finding places that will publish re-treads.) You don’t just need to have good ideas, you need to have new ones. So your writing sample has to explain how your idea is new and interesting.

As before, you cannot rely on the expertise of your readers to be able to assess how innovative your contribution to the field is, you need to tell them. This is exactly as it should be. If you’re doing your job in writing your dissertation, you know the literature that pertains to your thesis topic better than most people, so you’re the expert on this. You can then tell people what they need to know, i.e., what the state of the literature is and what your contribution is, exactly. So how do you do that? I want to focus on three aspects of the writing sample that, in concert, can accomplish the task.

Where We Are and Where We’re Going

In the previous post on writing samples, I suggested that you not motivate your paper by talking about what others have said, using the introduction and motivation instead to frame the specific thesis of your writing sample within the broader outline of your dissertation. Such an introduction should be relatively easy to read. Part of that is saying what your main point in the paper is without being too precise. That’s because precision usually requires you to state the main thesis using pretty carefully chosen words, and then explaining some of the key terms in the statement of your thesis. Doing that work in the introduction gets you bogged down.

The precise statement of your thesis can then happen after the introduction. In that section, you can begin by saying something about the relevant literature—perhaps you’re addressing a problem that has been addressed before. In that case, you need to outline the main positions, citing a few exponents of each. Chances are that your formulation of the thesis won’t coincide with anybody’s exactly, so one of the points of this section will be to explain how your thesis differs from other ones in the area, and why it differs in that way. Alternatively, perhaps you’ve found an interesting new problem. In that case, your problem is probably going to be in an area that people have worked on before, and you need to explain how your problem differs from what others have been doing. Also, if a problem hasn’t been worked on, people will often ask why this is interesting, important, or, for that matter, philosophy. This is where you address that question.

Name Your Claim!

This really goes along with the first point. There are various benefits to explicitly marking a single sentence as the thesis you want to defend—either by naming it, or by saying something like “the main point I want to defend…,” etc.

The first benefit is that it makes for argumentative coherence. In order to properly assess an argument, or anything else that an author offers in the course of a paper, I want to know why she offered it. There are always things to say about a sentence you read, but a reader will feel that she’s not really engaging with your paper if she’s not sure that what she’s saying about a particular point is relevant to the overall dialectic. For that reason, it’s always important that you can answer for yourself, and that the reader can answer for herself, the question: why is this here? What is its role in the overall argument? Having a named claim helps with that, because you can answer these questions in relation to that claim. Some options:

• This (paragraph, section, etc.) is part of the argument for that claim.
• This is a possible objection to the claim.
• This explains the significance of the claim for the broader dialectic in which you’re situating your writing sample.
• This explains why you’re choosing to formulate it this way rather than some other way.

If you’re asking these questions of yourself, you can also self-diagnose how well-structured your paper is. If you find that you’re trying to answer more than two of these questions in a single paragraph, chances are extremely good that you’ll be answering the same questions in parts of other paragraphs. Going back and forth between these tasks can be quite jarring and confusing to the reader, and it will usually also mean that you’re spending a lot of words making transitions from addressing one of these questions to the other. You’re text will be shorter, crisper, and just plain better if you can separate your achieving your various aims into their own paragraphs.

Aside from argumentative coherence, a named claim also provides a handy summary of what you’re after when people discuss your writing sample: “oh yeah, she’s the person who argued for…”. Ideally, that claim will also be your main contribution to the issue, problem, or debate you’re addressing.

Footnotes to Arguments

Obviously, if there’s relevant literature for some bit of your paper, you should footnote it. But don’t think of footnotes as the only, or even the best way for you to show off how well you understand your sub-field of philosophy. Footnotes shouldn’t be much more than lists of materials, perhaps with brief summaries of why that list is there, like “for a similar idea, see…”. And that makes for a certain shortcoming, because footnotes can only show off that you’ve read a bunch of things (or at any rate, that you’ve found the citations somewhere). They can’t really show off that you’ve understood them and gotten an overall picture of the area. A few paragraphs of actual prose can do that much better. And after all, if someone is looking for evidence that you’re going to produce interesting research that leads to a nice stream of publications, they’re going to want evidence that you’ve understood and mastered the materials you’re writing and thinking about, not just that you’ve taken in the words.

Again, think about how parts of your writing sample can do several jobs at once. Doing this successfully is hard, and it’s why writing samples take so damn long to produce.