atw: Re: Styles in resumes and CVs - was - Agencies and resumes
- From: Howard Silcock <howard.silcock@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:58:18 +1000
The obvious reply to this is that potential employers may not agree with
you. People on the list have already given examples that demonstrate that
some employers will check the styles in these documents. Are you saying
'well, I wouldn't want to work for one of those people anyway'? If you feel
strongly enough about it to take that position and let your CV go in the
bin, then good on you. But you probably won't get a chance to argue for your
point of view with those employers.
If the point of your post is to convince potential employers *on this list*
to reconsider their hiring practices, I suppose there may be some point to
what you say. But I'll be interested to see what responses you get.
Howard
On 13 August 2010 16:06, James Hunt <jameshunt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In a previous thread, contributors made two assertions that remained
> unchallenged: namely, that presenting a resume or cover letter formatted
> entirely in Normal style is Really Bad Form at least, and that insight into
> a writer's skills can be gained from an examination of the user-defined
> styles in a resume presented in Word format.
>
> I will argue that both of these assertions are false.
>
> Cover letters and resumes are short documents whose sole purpose, from a
> writer's point of view, is to gain an interview with a potential client or
> employer. That is, cover letters and resumes are essentially advertising
> pieces, directed at the person compiling the short list for interviews.
>
> Cover letters and resumes can be constructed with any tool that the writer
> considers appropriate for this attention-getting exercise. These documents
> are usually quite short - are there any resumes longer than three pages? -
> and are infrequently revised - how many times a year do you update your
> stuff? These are exactly the sort of documents for which Word is a good
> tool, and it is quite efficient to format such a document by using
> variations of the Normal style. Applying this practice to a book-length
> document will rightly bring charges of fingerpainting, but fingerpainting
> does have its place in the production of short, attractive documents that
> will rarely be revised.
>
> Even if a Word-based cover letter or resume is style-based, it is simply
> not possible to draw any conclusions about the ability of a writer to devise
> styles for longer and more complex documents. I will give an illustration.
>
> The Word versions of my own cover letter and resume contain only thirteen
> user-defined paragraph styles between them. The Word template for books that
> I have used and adapted on contract after contract for years contains over
> two hundred styles, covering many different circumstances, and a great deal
> of other material as well (title pages, front matter outlines, part pages,
> chapters, lettered appendices, outlines of custom ListNum and SEQ numbering
> sequences, useful VBA bits and bobs, ...): the template is about 100 pages
> long. It is a big step from thirteen styles to three hundred styles, and
> none of the extras in the template appear in my resume.
>
> I have heard these assertions from a number of sources, over several years,
> and I have concluded that technical writing has its urban legends, just like
> other fields, and that these urban legends are as long-lasting as anyone
> else's urban legends. It is possible to speculate about how these ideas took
> hold, and my own hypothesis is that they were invented as short-listing
> procedures. Now short-listing is hardly scientific, but folklore like this
> is not much help to anyone. I suspect that a random-number generator might
> be as good.
>
>
> James Hunt
> ----------------
>
> "... there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority
> afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past ..."
>
> Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
>
>
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