Abstracts

Let’s turn to dissertation abstracts. (This is another post in a series on job-market related things. Previous entries can be found here.)

The dissertation abstract that you produce as part of your job market dossier gives a brief overview of your dissertation, much like an abstract of an article gives a brief overview of the article. But it also does a whole lot more, and I want to mostly focus on that “more.”

As you write your dissertation, you need to get into the details of arguments and debates, pursuing whichever dialectical path you’ve chosen to traverse. At the beginning of that journey, you probably had to put together a dissertation proposal, explaining what you wanted to do and what the relevance of that particular proposal is to broader and/or more established debates in the field. Chances are that you haven’t seriously written about this question since then, and for good reason. You need to figure out where the arguments and positions you’re staking out take you.

But when you’re on the job market, it’s important that you’re able to explain the broader implications of your work, or at any rate, the connections to other areas and debates. And among the materials that you’ll prepare, there really aren’t any other venues for doing so at the level of generality the abstract offers you.

In part that’s due to the relatively low standards people apply to an abstract in comparison with more explicitly philosophical writing, and in particular the writing sample. If you say that your work bears on a bigger issue in the writing sample, you need to really support that assertion, and people will naturally view this kind of assertion with the same critical eye that they view the rest of your paper with. An abstract, by contrast, is read a little more passively. To be sure, you can’t just make up whatever you want, but you can also make assertions without defending them. Think of it as a check that you’ll have to be able to cash if somebody asks you about it, but you don’t actually have to put the money there up front.

In part that’s also due to the enforced brevity of the abstract. Indeed, the lesson is more general than just related to the abstract. Your writing can often benefit from trying to put the material you’re writing about into a different form, such as a handout, an audio-visual presentation (aka “powerpoint”), or what have you. In generating one of these other objects from a paper, you’re able to see the argument in a different, often much condensed form, and that has the potential to reveal especially structural problems with a paper. Perhaps considerations that belong together are spread throughout the paper, etc.

Consider some of the benefits of writing this kind of abstract. Chances are that, to the extent that you’ve talked about what your work is about, it’s been in very informal venues. Maybe you’ve had a couple of planning meetings with your adviser(s), maybe you’ve gone to a couple of conferences where you’ve chatted with other people. But you probably haven’t forced yourself to state the broad outlines of your project and its implications with the same kind of precision that you bring to your philosophical writing. Putting together an abstract allows you to do that, and chances are that in the process, you’ll make yourself aware of implications of your work that you might not have seen for yourself. I’ve had this kind of experience every time I’ve had to produce this kind of writing, be it for the job market, or for subsequent reviews (where this bit of writing is called a research-statement, but serves the same function).

At this point, it’s really useful to keep the check-metaphor in mind. Your abstract is writing a check, but you must be able to cash that check if somebody asks you about it. In order to be able to do that, you really must be able to substantiate the connections you’ve asserted to hold in the abstract. Usually, that will take the form of spelling out some further claims that will, if true, together with the main claims you defend in your work so far, entail some substantive claims in major debates in your area. Saying precisely which such connecting claims you need may well show you some fruitful areas for you to write about next.

And of course, a good abstract will also be a useful piece of text to work from as you’re preparing for your interview.

I won’t go so far as to say that being on the job market is fun, or even that it’s good for you. That would unduly minimize the many bad features of looking for an academic job. But I do think that being on the job market can have two beneficial side effects: it forces you to produce pieces of philosophy that you might not otherwise generate, and the pressure exerted by the fact that you’ll present these pieces of philosophy to many, many people, can really focus the mind.