10 Writing Tips for a Winning Web Site

By Mark Nichol

Some time ago, I posted some general guidelines for writing for an online audience. Here are some specific time-tested tips for attracting and keeping site visitors with clean, clear writing:

1. Keyword Top Labels

Use keywords for window titles and taglines, and keep them sharp and succinct. These labels are for helping Internet users get to your site because they typed them into a search engine and your site came up in the results, not for wowing visitors when they get there (assuming they get there, because you’re not using keywords to help searchers).

2. Keyword Display Copy

Employ keywords, not clever words, to begin headings, headlines, and link names, and keep the display copy brief. Most Web site visitors scan just the first one or two words of display copy. In “Where to Go on Vacation This Summer,” the first keyword appears as the fifth word of seven. (Go isn’t a keyword, because you don’t yet know what kind of going is involved.)

“Summer-Vacation Destinations,” by contrast, gives you three keywords out of three, with the two most important ones in first and second place. This approach is especially advantageous for a commerce site, but your personal blog shouldn’t be any different (assuming you want to attract new site visitors, not just impress current ones).

3. Avoid All Capital Letters

Don’t use all capital letters, even in display copy. All-cap text is harder to scan and to read. Do, however, use initial caps for headings and headlines.

4. Avoid Exclamation Points

Unless your site is all about bringing the funny — or attempting to do so — don’t use exclamation points. (Another exception: if all the i’s are dotted with circles or hearts.)

5. Omit Extraneous Spaces or Punctuation

All-cap initials and acronyms, of course, but don’t separate letters with word spaces — or with periods. Omit apostrophes when attaching a plural s to such abbreviations.

6. Avoid Superfluous Headings

Eschew headings and headlines like “Features” and “Links” for self-evident sections.

7. Make Navigation and Display Easy on the Eyes

Make it easy to find other pages and archived content, and avoid making the home page and other pages busy in general.

8. Keyword Navigation

Never use “Click here” or “More” (by itself) or “Next page” for a link name. Use keywords: “Archive,” “More Top 10 Lists,” “Ski Trip, Day 2.”

9. Limit Font and Background Styles

Avoid multiple fonts, font sizes, font colors, and background colors. Use one font for display copy and another for running text. Limit italics to emphasize of words and short phrases. Employ boldface generously in display copy but sparingly in running text.

10. Write for First-Time Visitors

If you want to attract a general readership, write for a general readership. Don’t dumb down, but do explain obscure terminology and do spell acronyms out. (You could provide a glossary, but briefly explaining, or spelling out, an unfamiliar term needn’t be distracting to either lay readers or experts.)

3 Types of Essays Are Models for Professional Writing Forms

By Mark Nichol

The three types of essay most commonly assigned in school — the narrative essay, the persuasive essay, and the expository essay — conveniently correspond to those writing forms most frequently published online and in print. Your experience with these prose forms is ideal preparation for writing for publication.

1. The Narrative Essay

This form, employed when reporting about an event or an incident, describing an experience, or telling a story, is the basic mode in journalistic writing.

Practice in relating what happened when you witnessed an occurrence or writing about what you were told by someone who witnessed it, is good training for becoming a newspaper reporter. Writing your recollections of something that happened to you is the basis of travel writing and similar content.

Meanwhile, effective storytelling is an essential skill for feature writing, which — as opposed to reporting, which is event-driven — focuses on a person, a place, or a thing, such as a company or an organization. (Travel writing, actually, is a hybrid of all three forms of essay writing.) Many magazine articles, for example, and a number of nonfiction books, are basically profiles of one of these types of entities, and fiction writing, of course, is a form of narrative, albeit one that is invented or based on a real-life subject.

2. The Persuasive Essay

In this type of essay, the writer attempts to convince readers to agree with an opinion. In a traditional persuasive essay, the writer states the essay’s topic and organizational scheme clearly and concisely, then emphasizes and clarifies the topic’s significance by briefly mentioning the current event or recent publication, for example, that prompted the writer to discuss the topic. The rest of the piece consists of the writer’s argument in favor or in criticism of a position.

This persuasion can take the form of a scholarly critique or a review of a creative effort such as a live or recorded performance (for example, a music album) or a work in some medium (a film, for instance). In either case, the writer begins with a thesis, or statement to be proven summarizes the position (or the plot or theme of a work of art), and provides further detail as necessary to amplify the essay’s points.

An essential component of a formal persuasive essay is a balanced discussion of an opposing viewpoint, while an informal review might include a mention of what an artist was attempting to accomplish by performing or creating and, for the sake of courtesy, could refer to how the artist succeeded in part even if the reviewer believes that the work is ultimately unsatisfactory.

Persuasive essays, like narrative essays, can be submitted for publication. Guest editorials in newspapers and magazines, reviews in the art sections of periodicals or on entertainment-oriented Web sites, or position statements for nonprofit organizations or political lobbying groups are all forms of persuasive writing that publishers of this content will pay for.

3. The Expository Essay

Expository writing can take the form of a how-to manual or another form of instruction, an explanation of a natural or technological process (an outline of the evaporation cycle, for example, or how to rebuild a car engine), a comparison of two similar subjects — though this form overlaps with the persuasive essay — or a discussion on a historical event or on future possibilities.

This last variation also has elements in common with narrative or persuasive writing, and in a sense, none of these types of writing is entirely exclusive. Therefore, if you, like almost all current or former students, have had experience with these forms of essay writing, you’ve already been trained (and, hopefully, coached) in how to write professionally.

And if you already do so, be confident that you can easily apply your skill in one form to taking on another: If you write position papers, you have no excuse not to move into instructional writing, if that’s what you want to do. Similarly, if you make a living explaining things in writing, don’t hesitate to explore fiction or nonfiction narrative writing if it appeals to you.

How to Identify Email Spam

By Mark Nichol

I received the following email message recently. Actually, it went to my spam folder, but other recipients may not be so fortunate — or so discerning about its deceptive nature. But if you read carefully, you’ll find plenty of clues that the writer is not a native speaker of English, much less an FBI agent. My editorial interpolations are in brackets.

Anti-Terrorist and Monitory Crime Division.
Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Daniel McMullen (Special Agent in Charge)

Attn: , [Mac, you forgot to fill in my name, or a generic term.]

This is to officially inform you that it has come to our notice and we have thoroughly investigated with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System that you are having an illegal Transaction with Impostors. [The Intelligence Monitoring Network System could be a brand-name system meriting initial capitalization, but it also could be — and is, according to an online search — a phrase that comes up only in reference to its inclusion in this message, a classic example of the Nigerian email scam. Furthermore, Rampant Initial Capitalization of Very Important Things, also seen in the phrase “Transaction with Impostors,” is a common occurrence in email-scam content.]

We the Federal Bureau Of Investigation want you to stop further communication with any Impostors claiming to be official. [The FBI would never use the royal we, it doesn’t capitalize the of in its name, and it wouldn’t simply tell you to “stop” anything.] During our Investigation, [not just any investigation, mind you, but an Investigation] we noticed that the reason why you have not received your payment is that you have not fulfilled your Financial Obligation given to you in respect of your Contract/Inheritance Payment. [More outbreaks of Raging Capitalists. Also, even FBI bureaucrats know that “we noticed that the reason why you have not received your payment is that” is more elegantly rendered “we noticed that you have not received your payment because.”]

Therefore, we have contacted the Federal Ministry of Finance [of(?)] Nigeria on your behalf and they have brought a solution to your problem by coordinating your payment in a total of $5,900,000.00(Five Million Nine Hundred Thousand Dollars). [The only place you will find monetary amounts rendered to the last decimal place — followed by the spelled-out rendering, with words initial-capped, in parentheses — is in Nigerian scam emails. No one else treats references to money this way.]

Since the Federal Bureau of Investigation [Mac, can you just call it the FBI, like everyone else, does? But thanks for lowercasing the of this time.] is involved in this transaction, you have to rest assured for this is 100% risk-free it is our duty to protect you. [The main clause of the previous sentence is a mess. Messages to the public from government agencies are better written than this.] We the Federal Bureau Of Investigation [there’s that royal we again, and a reversion to the initial-capped of] want you to contact the ATM CARD CENTER [All-caps = VERY IMPORTANT AND AUTHORITATIVE, but just what is the “ATM CARD CENTER”?] via email for their requirements to proceed and procure your Approval Slip on your behalf which will cost you $150 and note that your Approval Slip which contains details of the agent who will process your transaction. [This runaway sentence starts out coherently but eventually devolves into meaninglessness.]

CONTACT INFORMATION
NAME: Mr. Kelvin Williams
Address: 18 Koffi Crescent Apapa Lagos Nigeria [Is Nigeria, or the FBI — excuse me, the Federal Bureau Of Investigation — suffering a comma shortage?]
EMAIL: williamskelvin857@yahoo.com [Why am I emailing someone in Nigeria? Oh, right — because it’s a Nigerian email scam.]

Do contact [“Do contact”? The FBI sure sounds fussy these days.] Mr. Kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTER with your details and your full information So your files would be updated after which he will send the payment information which you’ll use in making payment of$150 via Western Union Money Transfer or Money Gram Transfer for the procurement of your Approval Slip after which the delivery of your ATM CARD will be effected to your designated home address without any further delay. [There’s evidently a period shortage, too.] We order you [You order me? Have I been conscripted? Oh, and, excuse me, sir, but you left out another word.] get back to this office after you have contacted the ATM SWIFT CARD CENTER [Oh, now it’s the ATM SWIFT CARD CENTER.] and we do await your response so we can move on with our Investigation and make sure your ATM SWIFT CARD gets to you. [What’s an ATM SWIFT CARD? Something available, evidently, only from Nigeria.]

Thanks and hope to read from you soon. [No, you will not be reading from me soon, Mac.]

Daniel McMullen
Special Agent in Charge
Criminal Division
FBI Los Angeles
Suite 1700, FOB
15000 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California
[Oops, you forgot your ZIP code, Mac. But that’s OK — I double-checked your street address, and it’s wrong. In an online search, it came up only in — wait for it — references to a Nigerian email scam. (This one, in particular.)]

Note: Do disregard [Fussy!] any email you get from any impostors or offices claiming to be in possession of your ATM CARD, you are hereby advice only to be in contact with Mr. Kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTER who is the rightful person to deal with in regards to your ATM CARD PAYMENT and forward any emails you get from impostors to this office so we could act upon and commence an investigation. [Again, the FBI does not condone run-on sentences — or comma splices.]

Note: There is actually a Federal Bureau Of Investigation agent named Daniel McMullen, but he’s stationed in Mississippi, not Los Angeles. Perhaps he was sent there as punishment for his atrocious writing skills. (That’s just a harmless little joke, denizens of the Magnolia State.)

Are you on the lookout for written passages to use as rewriting and editing exercises? Look no further than your email program’s spam folder.

How to Write a Speech

By Mark Nichol

Writing a speech and producing an essay have much in common, of course, because one is merely a spoken form of the other, but keep in mind the unique features that distinguish a presentation delivered with your voice and one that others read.

1. Plan your speech according to the occasion, considering the event, the audience, the tone of the speech (somber, serious, informal, humorous, and so on), and its duration.

2. Identify the message or theme of the speech, and how you will approach it.

3. Craft an effective opening that gets your audience’s attention, employing an anecdote, a joke, a quotation, or a thought-provoking question or assertion. You should be able to express your introduction in about thirty seconds or less.

4. Outline a handful of points to cover, just as you would when writing a persuasive or informative essay; after all, again, a speech is a spoken essay.

5. Organize the points so that they support and build on each other, and add or omit points as necessary to support your overall message or theme and to fit into your time limit.

6. Work on your transition from point to point.

7. Just as you began strongly, be sure to conclude your speech effectively by summarizing your points and finishing up with an additional question or comment for your listeners to take with them.

8. Write the speech out in full, and then evaluate it, working through as many drafts as necessary until you have honed and refined it to a crisp, clear, compelling speech.

9. When you are satisfied with the final draft, ask a couple of people to review it for you and suggest any material in it that may not be appropriate for the occasion, any flaws in organization or clarity of thought, any problems with grammar or usage, and anything that is not necessary or is missing. Revise the draft as necessary based on the feedback.

10. Though rehearsing for the speech itself is outside the purview of this post, practice reading the speech aloud to produce a final version that accounts for how it sounds as opposed to how it reads.

How to Write a Thesis

By Mark Nichol

An analytical or persuasive essay is a capsule thesis, and, like its more substantial analog, it requires a thesis statement. Here are some notes about how to develop that statement.

A thesis statement is a sentence (or two) that encapsulates and introduces an analysis or argument. An essay benefits from a thesis statement by concisely expressing the writer’s argument and serving as a basis for developing and organizing it.

If you are assigned to write an essay, whether in an academic or professional setting, the topic may or may not be given. If the topic is specified, you can produce the thesis statement by converting the explanation of the assignment into a question; your response to that question is the thesis statement.

For example, if you are asked to write about feeding wild animals, you might pose the question “Why is feeding wild animals a bad idea?” You might reply, “Feeding wild animals disrupts natural habits in animals and endangers them and the people who feed them.”

You would then research the issue and jot down notes about how feeding wild animals, or making food available to them, might make them dependent on food supplied by humans, which in turn may affect their ability to forage or hunt when the human-provided food may no longer be available. Another supporting point would be the consequences to humans: Animals that are fed may become insistent or even aggressive, damaging property or attacking humans or their pets; diseased animals may infect humans they come in contact with, and so on.

If it is your responsibility to select the topic, consider these elements of a successful persuasive essay: the topic is an issue that is arguable (that is, it isn’t a given that every reader would agree with you), and it can be adequately discussed in the framework of the assignment. In addition, confirm that you are adhering to one main idea and that, when you are done, you have not only stated your views but also supported your conclusions.

Distinguishing characteristics of effective theses are that they are specific, they clearly state the writer’s position, and they encourage discussion. These qualities should be apparent in the work as a whole as well as in the thesis statement itself.

How to Write a Report

By Mark Nichol

It is likely that, at some point in your career, you will be asked — or feel compelled — to write a report. Here are seven steps to producing a successful account or analysis.

1. Identify the report’s objective: Inform, or advise? If the former, predict, or review? If the latter, persuade or dissuade?

2. Consider your audience: Are your reader's experts, or laypeople? Are they fellow employees, or colleagues in the same profession or industry? Take into account their educational level and their familiarity with the subject matter to guide your writing style and your use and explication of specialized vocabulary.

3. Research your topic. If you have been assigned the report, be sure the person you received the assignment from has thoroughly briefed you on its goal and its scope. If you are initiating the report yourself, again, be sure you know those parameters. Then, consult with other stakeholders — those whose work relies on the dissemination of such reports — and ask any experts you know for advice before studying print, online, and other media sources and collecting data.

4. Using all this information, produce the first draft. Review it to ascertain whether you have covered all the pertinent points and whether the report answers questions and/or resolves concerns inherent in the topic. Revise as necessary.

5. If it is your responsibility to format the report and there is no template, research effective report design online and incorporate the principles to the best of your ability; however, don’t become distracted by this phase of the project or let design overwhelm you you the content. A crisp, clean presentation with an attractive layout is sufficient, but strategize how to use graphic information and how to emphasize key points with typographic treatment.

6. Ask colleagues or other knowledgeable associates to critique the latest draft and note any revisions they suggest — inserting or deleting sections or details, reorganizing the structure, clarifying your argument or your point of view, and so on.

7. Produce a revised version, step away from it as your schedule allows, and then finesse it to create a final draft. If editing and/or proofreading are not established stages in the report’s development, at least ask someone whose skills you trust to check for errors and incorporate the changes before submitting the report.

Five Tips for Writing a Great Speech

By Guest Author

As the founder of a speech writing firm, Inkwell Strategies, I’ve gotten used to drawing a certain amount of interest from new friends and acquaintances when asked what Ido for a living. After working in this somewhat niche profession for a number of years, I have come to expect questions about what the job entails, and even more frequently, inquiries about how to write a strong speech.

There are a lot of different ways to answer that question, but after crafting remarks for leaders in government, nonprofits, and the private sector, I’ve learned that there are essentially five rules that all writers should follow in order to write a winning speech:

1. Read your speech out loud

Unlike almost all other forms of writing, speechwriting is designed for listeners. So, when reviewing your text, read it to yourself, and pay attention to how the words sound and feel. Do they flow off the tongue, or are they clunky and awkward? If your phrases make you stumble, they are guaranteed to make your boss stumble as well. Just remember that good writing is not necessarily good speech writing.

2. Simple phrases are your friend

Keep your sentences short and sweet. Compound phrases with multiple clauses may look great on paper but are likely to confuse your audience and decrease the effectiveness of your speech. Limit yourself to one or two ideas per sentence, and express them as clearly and powerfully as possible.

3. Do your research

Before beginning a speech, make sure to familiarize yourself with the subject, so that you can write about it with confidence and authority. The creative aspects of speech writing are only effective when backed by a strong foundation of knowledge by a credible speaker. The audience must trust your words in order for their meaning to sink in. If you’re well-prepared, it will show.

4. Mind the time

A man once said that the key to crafting a great speech is writing a good beginning and a good ending, and making the two as close together as possible. That might not always be true, but consider this: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, arguably the most famous speech in American history, lasted less than three minutes. Compare that to the two-hour speech given directly before Lincoln by Edward Everett. If I gave you four-score and seven guesses, could you tell me what he said?

5. Know your audience

Your listeners should be a strong determining factor of the content, tone, and style of your speech. Before drafting remarks, think about who you’re speaking to, the venue you’re speaking at, and the timing of your speech. There’s a time and a place for every type of remark. It’s your job to figure out when and where you are.

These are just a few tips to get you started, but there is a lot more to speech writing than that. If you’re interested in learning more, make sure to check out my website for commentary and analysis about the world of speech writing today.

This is a guest post by David Melvin, President of Inkwell Strategies, a professional speech writing and strategic communications firm located in Washington, DC. He was chief speechwriter to the U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Senate Majority Leader.

How to Write a Proposal

By Mark Nichol

Writing a proposal is similar to but not exactly the same as crafting a persuasive essay or producing a report. Here are suggestions for developing a proposal, including some pertinent to its specific purpose.

1. A proposal should define a problem and describe a solution that will persuade busy, thrifty, skeptical readers to support it.

2. Employ facts, not opinions, to bolster the argument for approval. Research similar plans or projects and cite them, emphasizing their successes and/or how your proposal resolves the weaknesses, omissions, or mistaken priorities apparent in them.

3. Analyze your plan or project, demonstrating possible outcomes. If possible, model a small-scale version of the plan or project, report on the results and extrapolate how the full-scale plan or project will turn out based on the test.

4. Any discussion of financial or other resources should be conducted carefully and should present a realistic picture of the expense required.

5. Be meticulous in writing, editing, and design of the proposal. Revise as necessary to make it clear and concise, ask others to critique and edit it, and make sure the presentation is attractive and engaging as well as well organized and helpful.

A proposal should include the following elements:

Executive Summary: State the rationale for putting the proposal into effect, and summarize the proposal. (This allows a decision-maker to quickly get the gist of the proposal, hence the name.)

Statement of Need: Detail why the plan or project the proposal recommends is necessary.

Project Description: Explain specifics of the plan or project, and how it will go into effect, and how it will be evaluated.

Budget Analysis: Provide and explain how the plan or project will be financed and categorize and annotate operating expenses.

Organization Details: If the proposal is being submitted to an outside party, provide information about the beneficiary organization, including its mission, its stakeholders and who its serves, and the scope of its programs and services.

Conclusion: Summarize the proposal’s main points.

Top 10 Resume Writing Tips for 2018

 By Ali Hale

Writing a resume can be really tough. You know you need to convince an employer that you’re the best person for the job – but how exactly do you do that?

It can be especially hard if you’ve been out of the job market for a while, and you feel that you’re not sure what’s required from your resume – or if this is the first resume you’ve ever written.

Don’t worry! We’re going to quickly recap the basics, before digging into some crucial tips for writing a winning resume.

What Is a Resume Anyway?

A resume is a document that lets employers know about your work history, your educational achievements, and your key skills. If you’re in the UK, a resume is commonly called a “CV” (curriculum vitae). (Note that in the US, you may hear “CV” used to refer to a long, academic resume.)

What Should a Resume Look Like?

While there’s no absolute rule on how your resume should be formatted, a quick Google Images search for “resume” will give you an idea of how most resumes look.

It’s normally unwise to do anything clever or cute with the format of your resume: employers want to get information clearly and easily from it, and you don’t want to risk standing out in a bad way.

Your resume should include the following information, in this order:

• Personal Details (name, address, phone number, email address) – this goes right at the top of the first page. Normally, you should put your name in large font as the title for your resume.
• Personal Profile (optional) – a high-level summary of who you are and what you’re looking for from a job. This has become popular in recent years, though it’s not absolutely essential.
• Core Skills (optional) – immediately beneath your personal profile, you can opt to include a bullet-pointed list of your core skills, so your prospective employer can quickly see what you’re good at.
• Career History – list your past jobs, in reverse chronological order (the most recent job should come first on the page). It’ll usually be appropriate for your most recent job to have the most details.
• Education and Qualifications – this should come after your career history unless you’re fresh out of school/college – in which case it might make sense to give it greater prominence.

You can also include information about volunteering on your resume, especially if you have few or no previous jobs to write about.

Of course, you probably already know that you shouldn’t use colored backgrounds, lots of unusual fonts, or anything else that makes your CV look odd and hard to read.

So how do you write a winning resume in 2018?

Tip #1: Tailor Your Resume to Each Position You’re Applying For

If you only follow one tip from this list, make it this one: your resume should be carefully tailored to the position you’re applying for.

Don’t view your resume as a document that you write once then forget about. Of course, you won’t be restarting from scratch every time – but you should make appropriate tweaks to highlight how exactly your past experience matches up the role you want to be considered for.

You’ll almost certainly find it helpful to …

Tip #2: Use the Job Advert to Guide You

Whatever job you’re applying for, there’ll be an advert detailing what the company is looking for. Use this to help you make it very clear that you have exactly what they need.

For instance, if the advert says they need someone “who’s adept with Microsoft Word”, you might include Microsoft Word in your core skills, or mention it in the description for one of the jobs you’ve had in the past. If they ask for someone with “experience managing a team”, you’ll want to make sure you emphasize this in your career history … even if it was only a relatively small part of one of your roles.

Tip #3: Present Information Chronologically

Although some people think that a “functional” CV can help show you in your best light, if you have an unconventional work history, this will lead employers to wonder what you’re hiding! As Allison Green puts it in “here’s the right way to format your resume” on Ask a Manager:

Functional resumes – which are focused on one long list of skills and accomplishments rather than connecting them to a chronological work listing – are widely disliked by employers, since they make it difficult to understand what the candidate’s work progression has been.

Stick with the standard reverse-chronological order instead.

Tip #4: Give Appropriate Weight to the Various Sections

Normally, it makes sense for your most recent roles and achievements to take up the most space on your resume. You don’t need to go into lots of detail about a job that you had for six months ten years ago … it’s not likely to be very relevant to your employer.

The same goes for your educational qualifications: if you’ve graduated college, your high school classes and GPA are no longer very significant. You can include them briefly, but don’t spend half a page of your resume on them.

Tip #5: Include Examples to Back Up What You’re Claiming

It’s not enough to say that you have “excellent time management skills” – it doesn’t mean anything, and it’s the sort of phrase that almost any candidate can use. Back up your claims with concrete examples. For instance, you could write:

Excellent time management skills: managed heavy workload in a busy department, prioritizing and dealing with customer emails (frequently over 50/day).

Where possible, give figures: for instance, if you took on the task of writing newsletters to your company’s client base and this resulted in 10% more sales to customers on the newsletter list – say so!

Tip #6: Don’t Be Cutesy About Your Stay-at-Home Parenting

One rather cringe-worthy trend with resumes is for stay-at-home parents (both moms and dads) to describe their time parenting in terms of a job. For instance, James Wilkinson from Advice from Super Dad writes that:

If I was to include my stay at home dad role on a resume it would probably look something like this:

STAY AT HOME DAD
July 2011 – Present
Responsibilities /Achievements

• Primary child care duties.
• Design and implementation of household operational procedures.
• Supervising, training and managing children and their needs.
• Complaint resolution,
• Household bookkeeping and finance management

Additionally you may have had to learn to meal plan and cook, to do cleaning and washing duties or a myriad of other assorted essential household and child rearing skills.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that being a stay-at-home parent is hard work – it’s a whole job and a half, at least. I’ve every respect for parents. But this sort of entry does not belong in your work history.

It looks silly, it makes you seem a little desperate for something to put on your resume … and it could also come across as quite insulting to a potential boss who may well have children of their own (and all of these duties to handle in addition to their job).

So what should you do?

The safest professional approach is to simply leave those years out of your work history: you can write a sentence in your cover letter to explain “from July 2011, I’ve been a stay-at-home parent”.

Tip #6: Keep it to Two Pages Maximum (Unless You’re an Academic)

In today’s digital age, you might think that it really shouldn’t matter if your resume doesn’t fit onto two sides of a sheet of paper. But it does! If your resume goes on for three or four pages, no one’s going to want to read the whole thing … plus it makes you look like someone who’ll ignore professional norms.

If you absolutely need to fit in an extra paragraph or two, it’s better to go onto a third side than to squeeze all your text so that it’s tiny.

The main exception here is if you’re applying for an academic role, where you might well be listing your publication history, presentation experience, and so on in a longer CV. In this case, it’s often expected that your CV will run to three or four pages.

Tip #7: Use Bullet Points Where Appropriate

If you’re fresh out of school, you might think that bullet points look informal and odd. But in a business context, it’s completely normal to use bullet points to summarise information and to make it easy to take in.

You can find plenty of examples of resumes here on Live Career – this should give you an idea of how often bullet points are used!

Some key areas to include bullet points on your resume are:

• Your core skills (probably in a list with two or three columns, rather than a single long list that leaves a lot of white space on the right-hand side of the page).
• Your duties for each of the previous job roles you’ve held
• Your educational history and qualifications

Tip #8: Don’t Include a Photo of Yourself

This might seem like a strange tip, but it’s something that employers have increasingly mentioned as an issue – perhaps with the ease of taking and inserting digital photos.

You do not need to include your photo on your resume … however fantastic you look! Employers don’t (or shouldn’t) care what you look like, and it looks weird and unprofessional to put a photo of yourself on your resume.

(The main exception here is if you’re applying for a modeling or acting role when of course it is appropriate to include a photo.)

You should avoid including any other images in your resume, too: for instance, don’t put in company logos from the places you’ve previously worked. You might think it looks slick, but it can cause problems with formatting, and it’s frankly a waste of your time. Stick to text alone.

Tip #9: Use a Professional-Looking Email Address

This might seem like a tiny thing … but your email address matters. If you’re using tequilalover@hotmail.com, it’s not going to create the best impression.

A free email address is fine, but make sure it’s something sensible (probably involving your name, and perhaps a number if no version of your name is available).

Some people – and I’ll admit I’m one of them – feel that a Gmail address looks better than Hotmail or Yahoo because Gmail users tend to be a little more tech-savvy. The name of your email provider, though, really isn’t likely to make a lot of difference.

Tip #10: Triple-Check Your Spelling and Grammar

There aren’t many situations in life when a typo can be ruinous … but sending out a resume is one of them.

While most people would forgive you a tiny typo, a resume with several typos, or significant typos (like a misspelled company name) will inevitably make you look bad.

Proofread your resume as carefully as you can – there are some great tips here on Daily Writing Tips that should help.

If possible, get a second pair of eyes on it too: ask a friend to look over it and make sure you’ve not made any mistakes.

This is also a good opportunity to make sure that you’ve been consistent with formatting (e.g. that all your headers are the same size, font, and style), and that everything looks polished (e.g. that you don’t have a single paragraph running over the page break – if you do, insert a manual page break to neaten it up).

Bonus tip: Make sure to check our previous article 44 Resume Writing Tips for additional points you can use.

I know there’s quite a bit to take in here, and you might feel overwhelmed before you’ve even begun on your resume.

One of the best ways to tackle any daunting writing project – resumes included – is to start with a small step. You might open up a fresh document and type in your contact details, for instance … then you’ve made a start.

I wish you the very best of luck with your job search, and I hope you find and land the perfect role for you.

Why Teachers Need Plot, Emotion and Story

Students like stories. Teachers know that stories keep their interest. But the plot, emotion, character, conflict, and theme – the tools of a fiction writer – can be powerful tools for educators as well.

Having an attitude in class

Learning theorists have taught that students learn when they feel the need to; that in a sense, they create their own learning. Because emotion and character come from who we are, a lesson with a story motivates students to learn. When a problem is part of a story – when it involves people – finding a solution feels more urgent. When a California textbook talks about California earthquakes, California students pay attention. When two geological plates slip past each other and the earthquakes under the ocean, that’s interesting to some students. But when it causes a tsunami and destroys people’s homes, that introduces conflict, plot, and emotion.

Students remember information better in a story form. It helps me remember that Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia was unsuccessful when I imagine how he must have felt afterward. For one thing, he must have felt cold – which helps me remember the invasion ended in winter.

Even math teachers need plot, emotion, and story. Children can understand a word problem better when there is a storyline to it. I may not remember the exact answer to a mathematical word problem about John preparing dinner in the kitchen, but I might remember or estimate whether John ends up with too much or too little. Will John get his fill with two cups of food, or must he squeeze by on only half a cup? When the plot (and a hungry boy) depend on the answer, children are more likely to want to understand it. The story makes the problem more interesting to the student.

If the teacher or textbook takes no attitude toward the subject, students may not bother to take one either, or even pay any attention. The lecturer ends up sounding like a washing machine, and students can tell he or she is probably not trying very hard.

Using emotion to get into college

I remember new vocabulary words because I categorize them according to how they make me feel. I may not know the exact definition of equanimity but I know it’s a happy word. I’m not sure I can define opprobrium either, but I know it’s not a happy word. I didn’t learn either word from a dictionary but from my reading, where I have gathered their general meaning by repeatedly seeing them either in happy or unhappy contexts.

This technique of finding emotion is at the center of the strategy I teach for taking standardized college entrance exams such as the SAT. It works because many verbal test questions are little stories, with plot and emotion.

14. Though many Americans in late 1864 viewed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation with opprobrium, they greeted the capture of Atlanta with _______________.

a. indifference
b. elation
c. derision
d. trepidation

As long as I have the feeling that opprobrium is not a happy word, I can answer that question correctly even if I hardly understand anything else. I don’t have to know the history of the American Civil War, the role of President Abraham Lincoln, what the Emancipation Proclamation was, or even what, who, or where Atlanta is. I just need to imagine a crowd of Americans in 1864 hearing the latest news.

The key to understanding this class of question is the conjunctive adverb though, which always tells us that the second clause carries a different emotion than the first clause.

Now I know that the answer in the second clause must be a happy word because the first clause has an unhappy word. So to answer the question correctly, I simply need to choose the happy word from the list. Again, I don’t need to be able to define any of the words in the list, only to recognize whether they are happy words or not. To make the process simple, I mentally translate the question into:

Though the first thingamabob was [not happy], the second thingamabob was __________.

a. not happy
b. happy
c. not happy
d. not happy

I could use the same simplification technique with the conjunction but, as in “The first thingamabob was [attractive, safe, whatever], but the second thingamabob was [the opposite].”

The construction not only… but tells us the opposite of though, that the second clause is giving us more of the same emotion as in the first clause: “Not only was the thingamabob [useful], but it was [very useful, essential].”

I use the slang word thingamabob to mean that it doesn’t even matter what the thing actually is. What matters is the emotion in the clauses. It may sound like a vague technique, but by using it, I have achieved almost perfect scores on similar test sections in the PSAT, SAT, and GRE.

Why tell stories?

History is one of my favorite subjects. Even in elementary school, I would read ahead in my history book – it had stories, after all. But at an earlier point in my life, I didn’t appreciate history. History can be boring when teachers don’t relate facts to human nature. I remember asking a teacher why we needed to study it. I wondered why we needed to learn about events that happened to other people long ago.

My teacher explained that the stories of others can help us when we’re in similar situations. I read about a doctor who never expected to use what he had learned in his History of Medicine class until he found himself in a prison camp without modern tools and treatments. In times of prosperity, we can draw lessons from other prosperous societies. When hard times come, it’s useful to know how other generations weathered hard times before us.

A story is not just a way to make a lesson more interesting. A story can be the lesson itself. In December 1948, Israeli troops found the main road blocked to the central Egyptian garrison in the Negev desert. But Israeli general Yigael Yadin, an archaeologist by training, knew where a second road was. It had been abandoned thousands of years before, but with a little work, his troops made it through – because their general knew old stories.