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The Ways We Say 'No'

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By Thom D. Chesney

A few years back, a friend of mine, we'll call him Matt -- since that's his name -- received a rejection letter from a small literary journal in response to some poems he had submitted for publication. The response was simple and direct: Not these. Not now. Despite the conciseness and clarity of the note, Matt was understandably a little put off. Needless to say, his impression of the journal changed immediately, he vowed never to submit work to it again, and perhaps more importantly, he shared the letter and his impressions with virtually every writer he knew.

I shared Matt's experience with an undergraduate creative-writing class I teach as an assistant professor of English at Texas Wesleyan University. I wanted my students to be well aware of the range of responses that they might expect when they began sending out their own poetry and stories for review. Editors might be friendly, receptive, and respectful; or cold, close-minded, and downright rude. After class, one of the students commented: "I'd never send my stuff to that magazine. It sounds like getting published is a harsher experience than getting a job."

I was surprised at how quickly I responded, "No, they're about the same."

You see, I'm an unofficial member of that unofficial club of academics who save virtually every letter of rejection or acceptance that they receive. In my case, my largest collection of rejections numbers 235 -- all of which I received during the four-year period that spanned my search for a tenure-track job as an assistant professor of English. With aspirin in one hand and a highlighter in the other, I recently reread all of them, and from this one-inch-plus stack learned a lot about the way academic units -- English departments, in this case -- say "No" to prospective colleagues and the potential effect that it has upon recipients.

For starters, while many an English department offers course work in professional or business writing, I discovered that the generally accepted practice of incorporating "goodwill" into the first paragraph of a negative letter seemed to have been lost by the drafters of fully a third of the rejection letters that I received.

Most of these begin with language like, "I/We regret to inform you that ..." or "I am sorry to inform you that ..." or even "The search for the position in 'X' has closed." I doubt that any recipient of such a letter ever gets to the second sentence or an ensuing paragraph where maybe a global comment on the strength and size of the applicant pool appears. Although irritating, these letters are not the worst of the bunch.

That dubious honor is shared by all of those departments that think that an applicant will feel better knowing up front who actually got the job. Such letters open with "I am pleased to announce that 'X' has accepted the position of 'X' for the coming year" -- followed by a description of the victor's credentials. Most high-school students could read between the lines here. What the letter is actually saying is:

"Your credentials were not as good as those of X. So, you can't blame us for hiring her, but if you are as emotionally unstable and fearful of the declining job market as most graduate students in English are, you might wish to seek vengeance upon her rather than our search committee."

Not that anyone has ever gone after the winner, but it would certainly be easy to do when the letter includes the name of the institution that the new hire presently attends. All that's missing is her e-mail address.

Like it or not, a rejection letter implies certain things about the department sending it. No one in academe really wants to come off as sloppy or careless, but I have dozens of letters that make me think that it was fortunate I was not the final choice of one college or another.

For example, I am glad that I do not work for the Great Lakes-area institution that tried to soften the rejection by saying: "We do want to thank you for interviewing with us at the Modern Language Association meeting in San Diego at the end of December. We wish you the best of luck for your future prospects." In fact, I did not interview with them at the MLA or at any other conference for that matter. (One wonders if the candidate who was hired received the department's fond regrets in the letter of offer.)

Then there was the Rust Belt college that was kind enough to inform me by letter that my application was no longer under consideration because I had not submitted a complete set of credentials from my university's placement office. I found this perplexing, considering that two days earlier, I had received a postcard from the same college, acknowledging that my application was "now complete." (Neither a listing for a Dr. Jekyll nor Mr. Hyde appears in the campus directory.)

Still another anachronistic institution wrote in March that I would "sadly" not be invited for an MLA interview -- the previous December. (I suspect there is widespread confusion on this campus each year during the first blizzard of summer session.) I'll not even go into my thoughts on the New England community college that turned down my application for a math position. Linguistics maybe, but algebra? I have my limits.

Writing style, too, is an issue. To me, it suggests whether a department practices what it preaches. Visit any section of freshman composition on virtually any campus in this country, and you will hear an instructor actively and adamantly arguing against the use of passive voice in most writing situations, because it hides responsibility, clouds meaning, and is just plain wordy.

Why, then, did I receive so many letters that include the following phrases? And what am I supposed to infer about the people who send them?

• An individual has been selected for the position ...

• Your application was given careful consideration ...

• The initial screening of all candidates has been completed ...

• It was found that another applicant better suited our needs ...

In a similar fashion, other schools use vague, sometimes evasive language to drop the rejection bomb. My favorite example of this comes from a university back East:

"Because of the many applications we received, the process of selecting the finalists for the new English faculty positions was quite lengthy. It was also quite difficult to select so few from among so many worthy candidates."

Clearly this writer has aspirations for a career in politics.

It's worth mentioning here that, depending on what a search committee requests from applicants, one can spend up to $10 preparing, organizing, and mailing a single application package. So when a postcard that was printed and mailed for less than 30 cents arrives in my mailbox with two sentences that read, "The position in X has been filled. Thank you for your interest," it's no wonder that applicants feel mistreated.

Any word-processing program with mail-merge, spell-check, and grammar-check capabilities could resolve a lot of the nitpicky issues that I am about to address, but, in the end, it takes a conscientious, thoughtful, perfectionist of a proofreader -- be it a professor, staff member, or student worker -- to print, package, and mail the finished product. This leads me to some hard statistics and -- for balance -- a few highly subjective observations about the 235 rejection letters in my collection:

• A total of 185 incorrectly identified me as "Doctor" or "Professor" before either title had actually been conferred upon me.

• Fifty-nine included salutations in which no part of my full name appeared (e.g. "Dear Applicant," "Dear Sir," or the oxymoronic "Dear Colleague."

• Seventeen spelled one or both parts of my name wrong.

• Seven guessed incorrectly that I am a woman.

• Forty-two had one or more spelling mistakes of common words or proper nouns other than my name.

• Sixteen were unsigned (either personally or electronically).

• One was signed by someone whose signature clearly did not match the typed name appearing beneath it.

• Six departments used mass-produced, photocopied letters.

• One department used the same form letter two years running, printed slightly askew on the page, with a typed-in date that did not match the font of the letter's body.

• Universities with the largest endowments generally used paper or postcards of a quality inferior to that of their "lesser-endowed" counterparts.

• Institutions with two or more colors in their letterhead were more likely to use a personal salutation and include goodwill in the opening paragraph.

• The one school that mistakenly sent me the rejection letter of another applicant was also the one to use the most personal, supportive, and specific language about the search process, its conclusion, and my "inspired decision to become a college professor."

Whether there's a lesson in all of this, I'm not sure, which probably makes me no better of a letter writer than all of the drafters that I've critiqued here. But I'm tempted to consider my options for response if one of the less thoughtful institutions I've encountered should for some reason come calling for my services one day. Perhaps a one-line, e-mail message from me would suffice: Not you. Not now. Not ever.