Personal statements, letters of recommendation, all the machinery of academic application and placement: unimaginably important stuff in which almost nobody receives training or professional guidance. http://crookedtimber.org/2017/11/20/personal-statements/ …
The book that has helped me the most with writing letters of rec. is (perversely) Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members (a hilarious novel). It is not a model for what one ought to do, but it helped me feel more comfortable with the genre, to get beyond the stiff clichés.
