This post expands on a comment that I made on a research culture blog from the University of Glasgow, in a post about the narrative CV.
In the post, the author defined the narrative CV as “a CV written in a narrative style.” Overall the discussion was helpful, but it left one question unanswered: what does “narrative style” mean?
As far as I’ve been able to figure out, the original choice of “narrative” in the early days of this genre was an antonym for the “bullet points” of the traditional CV. In my experience, this word choice has proven infelicitous, because it leads writers to do things based on how they understand “narrative.”
“Narrative” brings with it associations and entailments that aren’t very suitable for this genre. To many people “narrative” means “story,” which means 1) chronological ordering 2) change over time 3) a developmental arc and sometimes 4) rousing writerly moments. This new sort of CV might be some of those things, but not all the time and not for all of the people.
I think it’s better to say it’s an “authored” CV, in the sense that you make authorial choices about what to include, how to arrange it, how to amplify certain things, and how to comment on and provide context for items. Yes, the traditional CV was also authored, but the palette of choices was restrictively small. But there’s no “story” here, no yarn. No hero, no nemesis, no complicating factor.
The new form allows you to comment on the information itself. In that sense, it’s a meta-CV. You might try writing one by annotating your traditional CV, then erasing the bullet points themselves after making sure that the information of the bullet point – a year, a publication title, an institution – is included in the annotation. What does it annotate? You explain where the project fits into your career; you explain what it led to; you explain why you did it and perhaps even what was at stake. Aggregate the annotations, voila! A narrative CV.
It’s also important to realize that there’s a process of cultural evolution that hardens the conventions of this genre. In other words, the first generations of narrative CV writers, when they applied for funding, made a range of structural and stylistic decisions. But only the decisions by the winners were passed on to the next generation, via people like me who provide proposal development support to writers. We used those winning proposals as examples, and over time those decisions are getting baked into the form.
This means that some moves which might be valid were ruled out because they didn’t appear in winning proposals. One move that I quite like (and used myself) is to situate the first-person writer in the act of writing. “Here I set in my house in X, where I live with Y, hoping that Z.” I’ve seen it in a successful personal statement for a fellowship, never in one of the several dozen academic profiles for the Dutch Research Organisation’s Talent Programme that I’ve worked with.
Writing in the first person is also universally recommended. Why? Probably because early losers used it and early winners didn’t. There’s no rule saying it must appear in the first person–yet people write it that way. And I’ve never seen anyone write from another narrative perspective–say, from a future self, or a past self, or from a disciplinary forebear. One could do that, but people don’t, probably because even the misapplication of the word “narrative” has its limits.
One view might be that this winnowing process brings us closer to what the narrative CV as a genre was always intended to be. Another view is that we’re losing touch with the full range of possible rhetorical moves that a narrative CV could be, and in so doing losing the full potential of the form.
Either way, writing with "narrative style" isn't the answer.
