atw: Re: Styles in resumes and CVs - was - Agencies and resumes
- From: Robert Levy <robert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:14:05 -0400
In short, a document that's brief and won't be revised very often doesn't need
to be put into styles.
While that may be true, I don't think it matters. I've personally met people
who tell me that they check the formatting when reviewing resumes for writers.
Whether that's a reasonable thing for them to do may be beside the point.
Incidentally, I revise my cover letter and resume for almost every job that I
apply for.
Thanks,
rwl
On Aug 13, 2010, at 2:06 AM, James Hunt 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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