Avoid “lazy” writing! Carpe Diem!

Amen!

1. Avoid qualifiers (adverbs) like: very, really, actually, honestly, currently.

2. Avoid ending sentences in prepositions.  Don’t think about, but consider, don’t talk about, but discuss.

3. Avoid overuse of “to be” verbs, and use active, vivid verbs: gyrate, and skulk instead.

4. Avoid the word “that.”  Read the sentence aloud.  If the sentence makes sense without “that” then remove “that!”

5.  Avoid cliches, and explain what you mean.

Typeography: More than just type

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You may not have thought much about typography before, but consider how fonts can carry certain connotations that can help reinforce (or contradict) your visual argument.

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And yes, you are making visual arguments, even if your text doesn’t technically include a “visual.”

Font Attitude

Fonts have “personalities.” These personalities can help reinforce the message you are sending.

Font choices can help increase your ethos as a professional, serious student, or as a fun-loving artsy type, depending on the image you want to project.

Font choices can also increase the ethos of the technical document you are writing. Font choices should be considered along with all the other discourse choices you make, like organization, design, color, etc., according to your audience and purpose.

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The Sinister Side…

But beware: font personalities that are incongruous with your message can obscure your message and destroy your ethos.

Some fonts, regardless of the context, have developed bad reputations. Comic Sans, for instance, seems to consistently appear on many worst fonts lists.

College Humor has produces a couple of videos that illustrate the personalities that come with some fonts:

Font Fight

Font Conference

“What Font Should I Use?”: Five Principles for Choosing and Using Typefaces

For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.

1. Dress For The Occasion

Many of my beginning students go about picking a font as though they were searching for new music to listen to: they assess the personality of each face and look for something unique and distinctive that expresses their particular aesthetic taste, perspective and personal history. This approach is problematic, because it places too much importance on individuality.

 

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The most appropriate analogy for picking type. (Photo credit: Samuuraijohnny. Used under Creative Commons license.)

 

For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font.

My “favorite” piece of clothing is probably an outlandish pair of 70s flare bellbottoms that I bought at a thrift store, but the reality is that these don’t make it out of my closet very often outside of Halloween. Every designer has a few favorite fonts like this — expressive personal favorites that we hold onto and wait for the perfect festive occasion to use. More often, I find myself putting on the same old pair of Levis morning after morning. It’s not that I like these better than my cherished flares, exactly… I just seem to wind up wearing them most of the time.

Every designer has a few workhorse typefaces that are like comfortable jeans: they go with everything, they seem to adapt to their surroundings and become more relaxed or more formal as the occasion calls for, and they just seem to come out of the closet day after day. Usually, these are faces that have a number of weights (Light, Regular, Bold, etc) and/or cuts (Italic, Condensed, etc). My particular safety blankets are: MyriadGotham,DINAkzidenz Grotesk and Interstate among the sans; MercuryElectra andPerpetua among the serif faces.

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A large type family like Helvetica Neue can be used to express a range of voices and emotions. Versatile and comfortable to work with, these faces are like a favorite pair of jeans for designers.
 

2. Know Your Families: Grouping Fonts

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The clothing analogy gives us a good idea of what kind of closet we need to put together. The next challenge is to develop some kind of structure by which we can mentally categorize the different typefaces we run across.

Typefaces can be divided and subdivided into dozens of categories (Scotch Modern, anybody?), but we only really need to keep track of five groups to establish a working understanding of the majority of type being used in the present-day landscape.

The following list is not meant as a comprehensive classification of each and every category of type (there are plenty of great sites on the web that already tackle this, such as Typedia’s type classifications) but rather as a manageable shorthand overview of key groups. Let’s look at two major groups without serifs (serifs being the little feet at the ends of the letterforms), two with serifs, and one outlier (with big, boxey feet).

1. GEOMETRIC SANS

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I’m actually combining three different groups here (Geometric, Realist and Grotesk), but there is enough in common between these groups that we can think of them as one entity for now. Geometric Sans-Serifs are those faces that are based on strict geometric forms. The individual letter forms of a Geometric Sans often have strokes that are all the same width and frequently evidence a kind of “less is more” minimalism in their design.

At their best, Geometric Sans are clear, objective, modern, universal; at their worst, cold, impersonal, boring. A classic Geometric Sans is like a beautifully designed airport: it’s impressive, modern and useful, but we have to think twice about whether or not we’d like to live there.

Examples of Geometric/Realist/Grotesk Sans: Helvetica, Univers, Futura, Avant Garde, Akzidenz Grotesk, Franklin Gothic, Gotham.

2. HUMANIST SANS

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These are Sans faces that are derived from handwriting — as clean and modern as some of them may look, they still retain something inescapably human at their root. Compare the ‘t’ in the image above to the ‘t’ in ‘Geometric’ and note how much more detail and idiosyncrasy the Humanist ‘t’ has.

This is the essence of the Humanist Sans: whereas Geometric Sans are typically designed to be as simple as possible, the letter forms of a Humanist font generally have more detail, less consistency, and frequently involve thinner and thicker stoke weights — after all they come from our handwriting, which is something individuated. At their best, Humanist Sans manage to have it both ways: modern yet human, clear yet empathetic. At their worst, they seem wishy-washy and fake, the hand servants of corporate insincerity.

Examples of Humanist Sans: Gill Sans, Frutiger, Myriad, Optima, Verdana.

3. OLD STYLE

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Also referred to as ‘Venetian’, these are our oldest typefaces, the result of centuries of incremental development of our calligraphic forms. Old Style faces are marked by little contrast between thick and thin (as the technical restrictions of the time didn’t allow for it), and the curved letter forms tend to tilt to the left (just as calligraphy tilts). Old Style faces at their best are classic, traditional, readable and at their worst are… well, classic and traditional.

Examples of Old Style: Jenson, Bembo, Palatino, and — especially — Garamond, which was considered so perfect at the time of its creation that no one really tried much to improve on it for a century and a half.

4. TRANSITIONAL AND MODERN

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An outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking, Transitional (mid 18th Century) and Modern (late 18th century, not to be confused with mid 20th century modernism) typefaces emerged as type designers experimented with making their letterforms more geometric, sharp and virtuosic than the unassuming faces of the Old Style period. Transitional faces marked a modest advancement in this direction — although Baskerville, a quintessential Transitional typeface, appeared so sharp to onlookers that people believed it could hurt one’s vision to look at it.

In carving Modernist punches, type designers indulged in a kind of virtuosic demonstration of contrasting thick and thin strokes — much of the development was spurred by a competition between two rival designers who cut similar faces, Bodoni and Didot. At their best, transitional and modern faces seem strong, stylish, dynamic. At their worst, they seem neither here nor there — too conspicuous and baroque to be classic, too stodgy to be truly modern.

Examples of transitional typefaces: Times New Roman, Baskerville.
Examples of Modern serifs: Bodoni, Didot.

3. Don’t Be a Wimp: The Principle of Decisive Contrast

So, now that we know our families and some classic examples of each, we need to decide how to mix and match and — most importantly — whether to mix and match at all. Most of the time, one typeface will do, especially if it’s one of our workhorses with many different weights that work together. If we reach a point where we want to add a second face to the mix, it’s always good to observe this simple rule: keep it exactly the same, or change it a lot — avoid wimpy, incremental variations.

This is a general principle of design, and its official name is correspondence and contrast. The best way to view this rule in action is to take all the random coins you collected in your last trip through Europe and dump them out on a table together. If you put two identical coins next to each other, they look good together because they match (correspondence). On the other hand, if we put a dime next to one of those big copper coins we picked up somewhere in Central Europe, this also looks interesting because of the contrast between the two — they look sufficiently different.

What doesn’t work so well is when put our dime next to a coin from another country that’s almost the same size and color but slightly different. This creates an uneasy visual relationship because it poses a question, even if we barely register it in on a conscious level — our mind asks the question of whether these two are the same or not, and that process of asking and wondering distracts us from simply viewing.

When we combine multiple typefaces on a design, we want them to coexist comfortably — we don’t want to distract the viewer with the question, are these the same or not? We can start by avoiding two different faces from within one of the five categories that we listed above all together — two geometric sans, say Franklin and Helvetica. While not exactly alike, these two are also not sufficiently different and therefore put our layout in that dreaded neither-here-nor-there place.

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If we are going to throw another font into the pot along with Helvetica, much better if we use something like Bembo, a classic Old Style face. Centuries apart in age and light years apart in terms of inspiration, Helvetica and Bembo have enough contrast to comfortably share a page:

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Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just picking fonts that are very, very different — placing our candy cane font next to, say, Garamond or Caslon does not guarantee us typographic harmony. Often, as in the above example of Helvetica and Bembo, there’s no real explanation for why two faces complement each other — they just do.

But if we want some principle to guide our selection, it should be this: often, two typefaces work well together if they have one thing in common but are otherwise greatly different. This shared common aspect can be visual (similar x-height or stroke weight) or it can be chronological. Typefaces from the same period of time have a greater likelihood of working well together… and if they are by the same designer, all the better.

4. A Little Can Go a Long Way

‘Enough with all these conventional-looking fonts and rules!’ you say. ‘I need something for my rave flyer! And my Thai restaurant menu! And my Christmas cards!’ What you’re pointing out here is that all the faces I’ve discussed so far are ‘body typefaces’, meaning you could conceivably set a whole menu or newspaper with any of them; in the clothing analogy presented in part one, these are our everyday Levis. What of our Halloween flares?

Periodically, there’s a need for a font that oozes with personality, whether that personality is warehouse party, Pad Thai or Santa Claus. And this need brings us into the vast wilderness of Display typefaces, which includes everything from Comic Sans to our candy-cane and bunny fonts. ‘Display’ is just another way of saying ‘do not exceed recommended dosage‘: applied sparingly to headlines, a display font can add a well-needed dash of flavor to a design, but it can quickly wear out its welcome if used too widely.

Time for another clothing analogy:

5. SLAB SERIFS

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Also known as ‘Egyptian’ (don’t ask), the Slab Serif is a wild card that has come strongly back into vogue in recent years. Slab Serifs usually have strokes like those of sans faces (that is, simple forms with relatively little contrast between thick and thin) but with solid, rectangular shoes stuck on the end. Slab Serifs are an outlier in the sense that they convey very specific — and yet often quite contradictory — associations: sometimes the thinker, sometimes the tough guy; sometimes the bully, sometimes the nerd; sometimes the urban sophisticate, sometimes the cowboy.

They can convey a sense of authority, in the case of heavy versions like Rockwell, but they can also be quite friendly, as in the recent favorite Archer. Many slab serifs seem to express an urban character (such as Rockwell, Courier and Lubalin), but when applied in a different context (especially Clarendon) they strongly recall the American Frontier and the kind of rural, vernacular signage that appears in photos from this period. Slab Serifs are hard to generalize about as a group, but their distinctive blocky serifs function something like a pair of horn-rimmed glasses: they add a distinctive wrinkle to anything, but can easily become overly conspicuous in the wrong surroundings.

Examples of Slab Serifs: Clarendon, Rockwell, Courier, Lubalin Graph, Archer.

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(Photo credit: Betsssssy. Used under Creative Commons license.)
 

Betsey’s outfit works because the pink belts acts as an accent and is offset by the down-to-earthiness of blue jeans. But if we get carried away and slather Betsey entirely in pink, she might wind up looking something like this:

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(Photo credit: Phillip Leroyer). Used under Creative Commons license.)

Let’s call this the Pink Belt Principle of Type: display faces with lots of personality are best used in small doses. If we apply our cool display type to every bit of text in our design, the aesthetic appeal of the type is quickly spent and — worse yet — our design becomes very hard to read. Let’s say we’re designing a menu for our favorite corner Thai place. Our client might want us to use a ‘typically’ Asian display face, like Sho:

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So far, so good. But look what happens when we apply our prized font choice to the entire menu:

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Enough already. Let’s try replacing some of the rank-and-file text copy with something more neutral:

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That’s better. Now that we’ve reined in the usage of our star typeface, we’ve allowed it to shine again.

5. Rule Number Five Is ‘There Are No Rules’

Really. Look hard enough and you will find a dazzling-looking menu set entirely in a hard-to-read display font. Or of two different Geometric Sans faces living happily together on a page (in fact, just this week I wound up trying this on a project and was surprised to find that it hit the spot). There are only conventions, no ironclad rules about how to use type, just as there are no rules about how we should dress in the morning. It’s worth trying everything just to see what happens — even wearing your Halloween flares to your court date.

In Conclusion

Hopefully, these five principles will have given you some guidelines for how to select, apply and mix type — and, indeed, whether to mix it at all. In the end, picking typefaces requires a combination of understanding and intuition, and — as with any skill — demands practice. With all the different fonts we have access to nowadays, it’s easy to forget that there’s nothing like a classic typeface used well by somebody who knows how to use it.

Some of the best type advice I ever received came early on from my first typography teacher: pick one typeface you like and use it over and over for months to the exclusion of all others. While this kind of exercise can feel constraining at times, it can also serve as a useful reminder that the quantity of available choices in the internet age is no substitute for quality.

Other Resources

You may be interested in the following articles and related resources:

Interview Mistakes: Using thank you notes to make amends

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Photo: Flickr. oops?

Have you ever made a mistake in a job interview? Said something you wish you could take back? Answered a question, well, wrong?

Oops!

Happens all the time. But, according to Beth Braccio Hering, there are things you can do to recover from embarrassing mistakes, including apologizing and avoiding the deer-in-the-headlights paralysis that can happen when you’ve said the wrong thing.

But what if you don’t realize the mistake till after the interview is over? That’s when she says you can use your thank you or follow-up message. If the mistake is fairly serious (no need to bring up a minor mistake that the interviewer may have missed anyway) you can try to correct the error – but use positive language. There’s no need to simply remind your interviewer of the problem.

Adding Value

Of course, the best thank yous are ones where you don’t have to apologize. Thank you messages should be timely (within 48 hours) and polite – and should be sent even for interviews that may not have gone so well. According to Don Straits, CEO and Dragonslayer of Corporate Warriors, the BEST thank you messages are also value-added: that is, they add something unique to the conversation, expanding on a topic that was mentioned during the interview.

Value-added thank yous are the way to go. But if you find yourself in a situation where you want to salvage an interview after it’s over, consider thanking the interviewer and correcting the mistake at the same time.

There are no guarantees when it comes to interviewing and followup messages, but leaving a positive impression is always a good idea.

9 CEO’s Share Their Favorite Interview Question

Vivian Giang, Business Insider

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

 

If you could ask job candidates only one question, what would be most telling?

As it turns out, many CEOs have one go-to interview question that they believe reveals everything they need to know about a candidate. Some swear by serious questions about a candidate’s best accomplishment. Others believe that silly queries about holiday costumes and the zombie apocalypse best reveal a candidate’s creativity.

From Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to Warby Parker CEO David Gilboa, we’ve collected top interview questions from the following nine company leaders.

On a scale of one to 10, how weird are you?

One of Zappos’ core values is to “create fun and a little weirdness,” Tony Hsieh, CEO of the company, tells Business Insider.

To make sure he hires candidates with the right fit, Hsieh typically asks the question: “On a scale of one to 10, how weird are you?” He says the number isn’t too important, but it’s more about how people answer the question. Nonetheless, if “you’re a one, you probably are a little bit too straight-laced for the Zappos culture,” he says. “If you’re a 10, you might be too psychotic for us.”

Another question Zappos usually asks candidates is: “On a scale of one to 10, how lucky are you in life?” Again, the number doesn’t matter too much, but if you’re a one, you don’t know why bad things happen to you (and probably blame others a lot). And if you’re a 10, you don’t understand why good things always seem to happen to you (and probably lack confidence).

Tell me about the time you realized you had the power to do something meaningful.

Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost, a web hosting provider and domain name registrar, says he asks one question to determine what motivates candidates: “Tell me about the first experience in your life when you realized that you had the power of change or the power to do something meaningful.”

“It’s open-ended. Some people might tell the story of when they were five and there was some incident and they had to take more responsibility for their baby brother or sister,” he tells The New York Times. “Maybe it was from their teenage years: ‘Something bad was going to happen at school and I stood up for this friend of mine and all of a sudden I felt self-empowered to do things.’ I think that’s really important. If someone sits there and they’re stumped, I think that tells you something.”

 

How would you describe yourself in one word?

The best candidates are the ones who know exactly who they are. That’s why Dara Richardson-Heron, CEO of women’s organization YWCA, always asks her candidates this question.

Richardson-Heron says she doesn’t judge people on the word they choose, but it does give her insight into how people package themselves. She tells Adam Bryant at The New York Times that she likes when people take time to ponder the question and answer thoughtfully.

What would you do in the event of a zombie apocalypse?

This seems like a ridiculous question to ask, but it’s posed to every prospective employee at Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop, a national restaurant franchise. Ashley Morris, the company’s CEO, says it’s the best way to learn how candidates react under pressure.

“There really is no right answer, so it’s interesting to get someone’s opinion and understand how they think on their feet,” Morris explains. “The hope is that for us, we’re going to find out who this person is on the inside and what’s really important to him, what his morals really are, and if he’ll fit on the cultural level.”

Tell me about the last person you fired.

Marc Barros, cofounder and former CEO of camera company Contour, swears by this question. “Of all the ways I interviewed executive candidates, this question and the discussion that followed proved to be the strongest indicator of the candidate’s leadership ability,” he tells Inc.

Barros believes a candidate who claims to have never fired anyone is clearly a bad choice. “You can’t build a great team without occasionally deconstructing and rebuilding it,” he argues.

If the candidate has fired someone, then he focuses on how the process went, which reveals a great deal about their communication skills. Did they offer feedback to the person and explain their reasoning for the decision? Barros says great leaders are like coaches, constantly giving feedback.

Tell me about your failures.

A good answer to this question is important because it means that the candidate isn’t afraid of taking risks and will admit when things don’t work out, says Jenny Ming, president and CEO of clothing store Charlotte Russe.

“It doesn’t even have to be business; it could be life lessons. I think it’s pretty telling. What did they do afterward?” she says. “How did they overcome that? I always look for somebody who’s very comfortable admitting when something didn’t work out.”

People always like to tell you about their successes, she explains, but they don’t always want to tell you what didn’t work out so well for them.

What was the last costume you wore?

It doesn’t matter so much what they wore, but why they wore it. If the candidate’s reasoning matches Warby Parker’s core value of injecting “fun and quirkiness into work, life, and everything [they] do,” they might have a real shot at getting a job there.

“We find that people who are able to make the job environment fun build followership more easily,” the company’s cofounder and co-CEO David Gilboa tells Iris Mansour at Quartz. “If we hire the most technically skilled person in the world whose work style doesn’t fit here, they won’t be successful.”

Tell me about your crowning achievement.

Lou Adler, CEO of hiring services company The Adler Group, says he always asks candidates to talk about their crowning achievement or most significant accomplishment. That question not only tells you what energizes the applicant, but also helps you figure out if their interests and passions align with yours.

“The idea is that if you understand someone’s most significant accomplishment or crowning achievement, and really are willing to spend 20 minutes understanding it, then you know what motivates the person,” Adler tells Business Insider.

Tell me about your last project. Who was involved and what was the biggest challenge?

To get a sense of how people work, Jana Eggers, former CEO of personalized clothing company Spreadshirt, likes to ask candidates about projects they’ve worked on.

“I’m interested in seeing how they organized themselves, how they think about projects, how they think about other people around them,” Eggers tells The New York Times. “There are very few jobs in any company these days where one person goes in and does it alone. They always have to interact with other people.”

BONUS: Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.

Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, says the company ditched its famous brainteaser interview questions in recent years for behavioral ones.

“The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information,” Bock tells The New York Times. “One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.”

 

 

22 Resume Mistakes That Are Way Too Common

By Vivian Giang, Business Insider

You have very little time to impress a recruiter with your resume. So the last thing you want to do is to make an easily avoidable mistake.

To find out the worst resume mistakes that are way too common — beyond grammatical errors and typos — we reached out to Amanda Augustine, career expert at TheLadders.

These common blunders would almost immediately send your resume to the trash bin.

1. It’s too long.

Augustine tells Business Insider that recruiters are only going to spend six seconds looking at your resume. So the longer your resume is, the more difficult it will be for recruiters to scan it. An appropriate length is one to two pages.

2. Using an inappropriate email address.

Email is the preferred form of communication in today’s workplace, so there’s no excuse for you not to have an appropriate email address. Don’t use email addresses (perhaps remnants of your grade-school days) beyond a standard variation of your name, such as “diva@…” or “babygirl@…,” says Augustine.

3. Including your headshot.

Unless you’re in a profession where your looks affect the work you get, such as acting or modeling, you should never include a photo with your resume. Including a photo greatly increases the chance you’ll be discriminated against, and the recruiter will spend too much time looking at your picture instead of considering whether your skills fit the open position.

An eye-tracking heatmap created by TheLadders found that when recruiters check out your professional online profile, they spend 19% of the total time eyeing your picture, which means that not so much time is spent on your skills, specialties, or past work experiences. Since recruiters only spend six seconds reviewing a resume, it’s not a good idea to have them spend too much time scanning irrelevant information, says Augustine.

4. Leaving out a URL to your professional online profile.

Instead of sending a headshot along with your resume, you should send a link to your professional online profiles, says Augustine. This will enable hiring managers to see what you look like after they’ve already spent an appropriate amount of time examining your resume.

Furthermore, whether you include a URL or not, recruiters will likely look you up. In fact, 86% of recruiters admit to reviewing candidates’ online profiles, says Augustine, so why not include your URL along with your contact information? This will prevent recruiters from having to guess or mistaking you for someone else.

5. Embedding tables, images, or charts.

“Avoid adding any embedded tables, pictures, or other images in your resume, as this can confuse the applicant-tracking software and jumble your resume in the system,” says Augustine.

6. Not aligning your resume with your online profiles.

“Whatever you’re going to put out there, make sure your resume and online profiles are telling the same story,” Augustine tells us.

“If you have a common name, consider including your middle initial on your resume and online professional profiles to differentiate yourself from the competition,” she says. For example, decide if you’re Mike Johnson, Michael Johnson, or Mike E. Johnson. Then use this name consistently, be it on LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

7. Leaving out relevant keywords.

Many companies use some kind of screening process to identify the right candidates, and if you don’t have the right keywords on your resume, you won’t even get through to a hiring manager.

“Identify the common keywords, terminology, and key phrases that routinely pop up in the job descriptions of your target role and incorporate them into your resume (assuming you have those skills),” advises Augustine. “This will help you make it past the initial screenings and on to the recruiter or hiring manager.”

8. Using an objective instead of an executive summary.

Objectives are unhelpful and distracting, according to Augustine, so it’s a waste of space to include them on your resume. Instead, replace this fluffy statement with an executive summary, which should be like a “30-second elevator pitch” where you explain who you are and what you’re looking for. ”In approximately three to five sentences, explain what you’re great at, most interested in, and how you can provide value to a prospective employer,” Augustine says.

9. Not addressing potential concerns.

Do you require a work visa sponsorship or are you willing to relocate for a job? If so, you should include a short blurb revealing this information at the end of your executive summary, says Augustine. It doesn’t have to be long because you can go into more detail in the cover letter.

If you’re trying to relocate to another city, remove your current city and state from your resume.

10. Using headers and footers.

It may look neat and concise to display your contact information in the header, but for “the same reason with embedded tables and charts, it often gets scrambled in an applicant tracking system,” says Augustine. Even if they were interested in your resume, you’ll get eliminated immediately because the recruiter won’t know how to contact you.

11. Inconsistent formatting.

“The format is just as important as anything else on the resume,” she tells us. ”The key is to format the information in a way that makes it easy to scan and recognize your job goals and relevant qualifications.”

Make your resume easy to read by sticking to specific formatting rules throughout your resume. For example, if you decide to include the month and year on your resume, you should adhere to this format throughout. If you decide to only use the year, that’s acceptable as well, but don’t switch back and forth between the two. You should also be consistent with locations and indentations.

12. Using crazy fonts and color.

“Stick to black and white color,” says Augustine. As for font, it’s best to stick with the basics, such as Arial, Tahoma, or Calibri.

13. Not having enough “white space.”

White space draws the reader’s eyes to important points. ”When you start really messing with the margins on your resume, chances are you’re cramming as much as you can in there, and you won’t have enough white space,” she tells us.

14. Not using reverse chronological order.

This is the most helpful for recruiters because they’re able to see what you’ve been doing in recent years immediately, says Augustine. “The only time you shouldn’t do this is if you’re trying to transition to another career altogether, but then again, in this situation, you’ll probably be relying more on networks,” than your resume, she says.

15. Not including a company description.

While it’s helpful for recruiters to know the size of the company you used to work for, including a brief description about the company will also let the hiring manager quickly understand the industries you’ve worked in. For example, an accountant in the tech industry may be considered very differently than an accountant in the hospitality industry.

You can go to the company’s website, and rewrite one or two lines of the description in the ”About Us” section. This should be included right underneath the name of the company.

16. Using dense blocks of text.

Dense blocks of text are too difficult to read, says Augustine. Instead, you should list your achievements in two to five bullet points per job. Under each job or experience you’ve had, explain how you contributed to or supported your team’s projects and initiatives. ”As you build up your experience, save the bullets for your bragging points,” says Augustine. For example, “I generated $50,000 in annual savings by doing…”

17. Including more than 15 years of experience.

You should always tailor your resume based on the job you’re applying for, and chances are that when you include experience that’s older than 15 years, it won’t be of interest to a hiring manager, says Augustine. Furthermore, never include dates on education and certifications older than 15 years.

18. Including irrelevant information.

If you work at a small company and you do a little bit of everything, you really need to think about the responsibilities and accomplishments you’ve had that are relevant to the job you’re applying for, advises Augustine. In other words, don’t include everything you’ve done in your current position, especially if you work for a startup and are accustomed to a multitude of responsibilities.

19. Not including relevant hobbies.

“Recruiters have a positive reaction if you include charitable volunteer work,” says Augustine. “Just because you aren’t getting paid, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include it on your resume.” Again, do make sure to tailor the skills you acquired while participating in the hobby to the job position you’re applying for.

20. Including skills that most jobseekers will have.

Should you ever say that you’re proficient in standard programs? This depends on what is deemed sought-after in your industry.

“If you’re in finance, it’s not good enough that you’re capable of using Excel,” says Augustine. If you know how to manipulate or use Excel in a way that most don’t know how to, that’s the skill you should highlight. Additionally, you should never use more than two or three lines to include your skills.

21. Writing in the third person or using pronouns in first person.

Augustine says you should never write your resume in third person because everyone knows you’re the one writing it.

Instead, you should write it in first person, and do not include pronouns. ”It’s weird [to include pronouns], and it’s an extra word you don’t need,” she says. “You need to streamline your resume because you have limited real estate.”

22. Including “references upon request.”

Every recruiter knows you’re going to provide references if they request it, so there’s no reason for you to include this line. Remember that space on your resume is crucial. Don’t waste it on a meaningless line, Augustine tells us.

Twitter

By now you’ve most likely joined Twitter (and if you haven’t, you need to, pronto!). Twitter is not only a great place for businesses and marketers, but it’s also a great place to spruce up your writing skills.

Yes. You read that correctly.

Twitter can make you a better writer. Here’s how.

 

Twitter forces you to be concise

If you’ve ever used Twitter, you know that you have 140 characters to say whatever you want to say. Now keep in mind, I didn’t say 140 words—or even 140 letters—I said 140characters.

That’s not a lot of room. Letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces all count as characters on Twitter.

What all of this means is, you have to be concise. You have to know exactly what you want to say, and say it in as few words as possible.

Many writers, however, are “wordy” and often have long, drawn out descriptions and sentences, so it can be pretty difficult to create a message that’s only 140 characters.

Here’s where Twitter comes in again.

Twitter forces you to exercise your vocabulary

Since you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you’re forced to dust off your dictionary and thesaurus and find new words to use—Words that are shorter, words that are more descriptive, and words that get the job done in 140 characters or less.

Crafting a message for Twitter requires you to “pump up” your verbs (replacing adverbs and adjectives with them), and discover a better, clearer and more concise way to say what you want to say.

Now most people won’t hit 140 characters right away. No, they’ll end up with 160 or 148 characters to start out with (Twitter tells you how many characters you need to remove to make your message fit).

This is the final way that Twitter makes you a better writer.

Twitter forces you to improve your editing skills

Every writer needs to be able to edit their work. And by using Twitter, you can really hone your editing skills and make them top-notch.

It’s almost like playing a game; trying to write a 140-character message and still get your point across in a way that inspires your followers to take action, to click on your link or to “retweet” your post.

I like to think of it as a brainteaser, forcing me to think hard and dig deep down into my vocabulary to find a way to shorten my message.

I’ve been using Twitter since January, and my writing skills have not only improved, but I’ve been writing better copy as well.

Yet another reason you should be using Twitter. Not that you needed one.

About the Author: Jennifer Blanchard is a creative and effective copywriter. Her blog,Procrastinating Writers, offers writing advice, motivation and inspiration for writers who procrastinate.