It's Hard to Read You, Like I'm Illiterate

I've spent the last couple of hours going over my spreadsheet of jobs and getting the various addresses in the right format to print them onto labels. (Or at least, I hope I've got the addresses in the right format. Last year, MS Word fucked up all my labels, so even though I'd told it exactly what brand of address labels I was using, I still to had to screw around with the formatting on each sheet of labels to get them to come out right.)

Anyway, one of my office mates and I were just talking about how unreadable the JFP is. It's a spectacularly badly edited document. First, there isn't a standard format for the ads. Yeah, I know total standardization would be impossible. But fuck that. Would it kill departments doing tenure-track searches to all start their ads with the ranks, AOSs, AOCs, and deadlines of their searches? In that order, and in a list rather than a rambling, relative clause-laden sentence? Look, it's easy:

Rank: Assistant professor (tenure-track). AOS: Open. AOC: M&E and History preferred. Deadline: Nov. 1, 2007.

Then the ad could say whatever else needed to be said, and no one would have to do a close reading of the whole 350 words to find the deadline. Wouldn't that be nice?

But even worse, have you noticed how there's ads doubled-up in the web-only additions? Take Cornell. It looks like they've got one job that's numbered both 55 and 444. Doesn't that shit get any copy-editting? Come on.