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Scholars who have been on the academic market in recent years know the competition for limited tenure-track jobs is fierce. But what they usually don't realize is that there is still room to negotiate if they are offered a position.

Search committees often place a great deal of importance on cover letters when they're reviewing candidates, but I've yet to meet a job seeker who has received much training or mentoring on how to write one. So what differentiates good cover letters from weak ones?

No one mentioned teaching portfolios in the professional-development seminars I attended as a doctoral student, so when I encountered requests for that item (or the vaguer "evidence of teaching effectiveness") in a handful of job calls last year, I balked.

In January 2011, a trio of researchers published the results of an experiment in which they demonstrated that students who read material in difficult, unfamiliar fonts learned it more deeply than students who read the same material in conventional, familiar fonts.