atw: Styles in resumes and CVs - was - Agencies and resumes
- From: James Hunt <jameshunt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:06:16 +1000
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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