What Do Newspapers, Money Clips, and Garlic Have To Do With Life? I lost my father when I was still a young man of 27. That’s a lot more time than many people get, but it was too early for him to go. I still had a lot to learn. But every year on father’s…
When To Take Resume Advice, and When To Ignore It Most people pretend to listen to advice, but they seldom heed it. And nowhere is this more true than with resume advice. I see a lot of resumes. A few are good. A respectable number are okay. But most are poorly written. I try my…
What Does a Resume Screener Look Like? Before we get started on this, I’d like to ask a few questions. What does a nephrologist do? How about a manufacturing engineer? Clinical psychologist? Disk drive engineer? Pharmacokineticist? Would you know the requirements for each of the above positions? I’d be surprised if you did. But assuming…
How To Beat the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) Have you ever wondered what happens to your resume once you send it off? Most of it depends on where you sent it, and what type of system—if any—they use for screening. Since most companies use ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems), we’ll focus on that process. (We’ll also…
I wrote a post a few months ago about “What To Capitalize on a Resume,” but from the number of emails I receive it’s obvious I didn’t go into enough detail. In this post, I’ll cover a few of the rules for capitalization, and we’ll go into more detail on each of them. These are…
Do you struggle deciding which words to use on your resume? Many people do, which prompted me to write this article. I did another post on impact words for resumes, and also one about how powerful words can be in all of your writing. Today, we’ll explore the opposite side, and talk about the words…
Building From Scratch to Develop Characters I was talking to an author last week about the writing process and she told me about a great character she had developed. I asked what role the character played in her book. She said, “I’m not using him in this book. I’m saving him for the next one….
Words can be very powerful. And since your resume is — by necessity — limited to a page or two, it is important that the words you use have impact. Resumes consist of incomplete sentences and bullet points; you can’t afford to use weak or passive verbs. I compiled this list from many sources,…
What Do You Know About Your Characters Character development is the most important aspect of a novel. You might get a few arguments about this statement, but surely almost everyone will place the importance of characters at the first or second position. We’re not going to discuss how you develop your characters, but rather what…
Hyphens, en Dashes, Em Dashes In order to understand an em dash, it’s important to put it into perspective. That means we need to explore a few details on hyphens and en dashes. The following are definitions from CMOS (Chicago Manual of Style). Hyphen The hyphen connects two things that are intimately related, usually words…