Make sure your cover letter is on university stationary. Here is a latex template to generate a cover letter on university stationary.
These are bits of advice I give in response to nearly all research statements, so I decided to collect them here.
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Consider your audience
Most of the other tips follow from this. For academic positions (masters and PhD programs, postdocs, or faculty positions), your audience is a professor who is reading this as application #173 of 400 on little sleep with a broken coffee machine, right before a paper deadline, during a break from teaching, and with a sick child in their lap. You want the topic of study to be obvious and gripping. Enable them to absorb your impact with minimal time and effort. They will love you for it. -
2-pages max
Start with an executive summary paragraph, talk about what you've done for a page or so, and then talk about your future plans -
Space out your text
Use a decent font size (12-point), utilize line spacing, increase line spacing between your paragraphs. You've done a ton of work and you want to showcase it, but if you send a wall of text, committee members won't read or retain any of it. Showcase the highlights. During the interview, you can bring up additional projects as they become relevant. -
Use section headers
These should state the takeaway for each section. They will take additional space, but committee members can easily skim for takeaways and remember them after (and if not, they can easily skim to refresh on your takeaways after reading the remaining 200 applications). -
Use color and figures
Most applications are entirely black and white. Adding a subtle color to your name or to section headers can be memorable and help your application stand out. Make sure the colors are legible and are not distracting. Similarly, if you can convey your findings or research agenda using a figure, it will break up the wall of text and will enable readers to quickly see what you're about. Just make sure the figures are extremely intuitive to interpret. -
Check your spelling
You have very little space to make an impression, so fix any typos. Run a spell checker on your statement. Ask for feedback from others. Your advisors can help you with the framing, but your friends and family can check your spelling and grammar even if they're not experts in your field.
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>=1 self-citation per section
The statement should showcase your work and establish you as an expert to faculty who are somewhat outside your area (that's why they're hiring you). That means each section in your statement needs to serve to highlight work you've done in that area, and one way to do that is to cite work you've done in that area. -
Limit the exposure of vaporware
The future work section is where you can talk about your future plans. Before then, you want to establish your credentials as an expert. As much as possible, talk about work you've already done or for which you have pilot results. Avoid talking about plans outside the future plans section where possible. -
Avoid talking about your dissertation
You should not have this kind of phrase in your statement: "As part of my dissertation, I plan to X." They are hiring someone who has already finished her dissertation and is blowing the world away with her brilliant work. Generally avoid talking about your dissertation and instead just talk about your work (which obviously includes work on your dissertation). If you haven't published in an area, try to at least present a figure showing to results to indicate that you're actively working on the planned stuff and publication is imminent. -
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is critical
More and more, schools are tuning into their institutional lack of diversity as a problem that stifles scientific exploration. To address this issue, some programs ask for an explicit diversity statement so applicants can explain to committees how they can help increase equity at the university. Many other schools don't ask for an explicit DEI statement, but the search committees will still be looking for evidence that applicants can help with this issue. Therefore, to the extent possible, try to weave your DEI commitments into your teaching and research statements. This also shows that you take the issue seriously and that it's not just an afterthought to get hired. -
Include an open science commitment
If you produce tools or data, you should open them up to the public when possible. Doing so prevents reinvention of the wheel and helps others see exactly what you did in a paper (there will always be some critical preprocessing detail you omit from the paper). Including a brief statement that you adhere to open science is increasingly important for social science positions given recent large-scale replication failures in the social sciences. For computer science, this kind of statement is less important since it is assumed that you publicly release everything (just make sure that you do).