My Track Record
I began editing promotion and tenure dossiers in 2017, and now regularly edit 6–8 dossiers per year. To my knowledge, every promotion and tenure candidate I’ve supported to date has had their application approved. Of course, this is correlation, not causation; it may be that these candidates would’ve been successful without my help! As with grant application editing, there are no guarantees of success when you hire an editor to support your application for promotion or tenure.
My Approach
As an instructor and researcher, you aren’t judged on the quality of the work that you do in the lab, the archive, the classroom, the clinic or the community. Instead, you’re judged on your ability to communicate that work in a 200+ page dossier. My expertise is in helping you to communicate your accomplishments and impact.
My goal is to support you through what can be a stressful, time-consuming process, to ease the burden of work that comes with applying for promotion or tenure, and to help you to understand the options available to you in how you choose to communicate your accomplishments.
P&T editing is a collaborative process that brings together my experience and editing skills with your knowledge of your department, Faculty, and institution. My edits are suggested solutions to problems that I identify in your text; if you think the solution I’m suggesting won’t work for your context, you’re welcome to revise it yourself, or we can together come up with a new solution that works better.
I’ve written about my approach to P&T dossiers in my column, Ask Dr. Editor: “Documenting your work for promotion and tenure” (January 2026), “Demonstrating impact in your tenure dossier” (April 2025) and “How to write persuasively in promotion and tenure documents” (June 2020). In Inside Higher Ed, I have published “A Primer for Prepping for Tenure Review” (May 2024, with co-author Kate Vacek), and “Anatomy of the Research Statement” (November 2025).
Your Involvement
When I work on your P&T dossier, you won’t be able to take a hands-off approach. You’ll be bringing your judgment and your discipline- and institution-specific knowledge to the work; you’ll know better than I do how a particular document, paragraph, or phrase might be understood in your context, and you’ll need to bring that expertise into our collaboration. Sometimes these edits can be worked out via an email exchange; in some cases, though, we may need to meet over Zoom to together determine the best approach to the work.
If I’m supporting you in bringing together all the evidence and examples in the appendices of your dossier, then I’ll need your eyes and your help in the days before the dossier is completed. For instance, it’ll be your job to ensure that the documents are in the right order before I begin stitching all the pieces into a single PDF and adding the hyperlinks. When I work closely on the early-stage, high-level edits of a document, it becomes harder for me to proofread it accurately—that’s why publishers hire proofreaders who haven’t worked previously on a book to look for errors. Because I can’t effectively proofread a document that I’ve edited at a high level, it’ll be your job to confirm that you are happy with each part of your dossier before we convert it to a PDF and stitch it together. Some folks hire an RA to proofread; others use AI; others trust their own eyes to do the work best. If you want me to subcontract a proofreader, that’s something I’d be happy arrange and for which we can budget time if you request it when we first decide to work together.
In short: working with an editor doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be involved in the work of compiling your dossier. Applying for tenure and promotion is always going to be a lot of work. If you hire me as your editor, I’ll give you more choices and more confidence in the decisions you make, and I’ll shoulder a lot of the grunt work like creating hyperlinks within a PDF.
Still, you are still responsible for the final document that gets submitted, and I’ll need your perspective, expertise, and eyes throughout the process.
If you’re working on a 200+-page dossier, you should hold ~8 hrs of time in the days before you submit; you’ll spend this time finalizing text and the PDF, because there are points in the process after which making changes or correcting typos becomes exceptionally time-consuming, and I’ll want your approval before we pass those points.
Testimonials
“Letitia, I am truly grateful for everything you did. Your work went beyond editing and wordsmithing; it brought my dossier to life. Your impressive insight on how to make pages of promotion and tenure documents appealing to the reviewers was invaluable. Your love, care, and understanding of the stressful P&T process were remarkable. You had a magic touch, and your contribution to my package was critical to my promotion!” – Professor of Teaching, Health Sciences
“Letitia and her team take an overwhelming documentation process and break it down into manageable goals. She provided constructive, meaningful feedback throughout that helped me to develop the skills I needed to understand, and clearly speak to, institutional criteria that are not always easy to parse. This, combined with her attention to detail and depth of understanding of the P&T process meant that I was confident that the file I submitted made the best possible case for my research, teaching, and service.” – Associate Professor, Educational Studies
“Letitia’s meticulous attention to detail and expertise in crafting clear and concise prose make her an invaluable ally for academics around the world. Letitia excels at helping individuals articulate their ideas effectively. I would not have received my promotion without her support.” – Full Professor, Education
“I have really enjoyed working with you and hope to do so again. Despite not having training in my academic discipline, I’ve been so impressed by your ability to offer incisive and useful critiques of my teaching, research, and EDI statements. I certainly feel more confident now in how these statements reflect my thinking and approach with greater clarity and evidence.” – Assistant Professor, Religious Studies
“It’s very rare to have an attentive, detail-oriented, independent perspective on a complete research dossier before proceeding with the promotion & tenure process. Letitia’s edits and suggestions were extraordinarily helpful in ensuring completion and advancing the narrative in my dossier.” – Associate Professor, Physical Therapy
Pricing
I offer a package edit, which involves two rounds of editing of your key documents (e.g. research, teaching, and service statements). I also edit your CV and ensure its alignment with your institution’s CV template, and combine your appendices (e.g. syllabi, student evaluations of teaching, sample assignments and rubrics, publications) into a PDF with bookmarks (i.e. a hyperlinked table of contents). This service costs $3000CDN + tax.
For candidates who only need selected materials edited, I offer an hourly editing option, which is $125CDN/hr + tax.
Contact me to book this service.