31 Words and Phrases You No Longer Need

Close your eyes. Imagine words as people in an office setting. The verbs scurry about, active and animated, getting things done. The adjectives and adverbs conjure ideas and images in the marketing department. But there’s always that one guy. See him? He’s over by the water cooler, leaning against the wall. He’s omnipresent, and yet nobody really knows what he does. He may be hanging around, but he sure doesn’t seem to be pulling his weight.

That One Guy could represent any word or phrase that always shows up in our writing but doesn’t contribute anything. Here’s a list of thirty-one words and phrases you need to take off your payroll this year.

Slacker Words and Phrases

At all times

Watch out for flabby phrases at all times.

Each and every

Look for filler words in your writing each and every day daily.

As yet

We don’t know as yet whether we’ll succeed.

In order

Eliminate excess verbiage in order to clean up your writing.

Basically, essentially

These words basically don’t add value. They’re essentially useless.

Totally, completely, absolutely, literally, actually

Without filler words, your writing will be totally fabulous.

Very, really, quite, rather, extremely

These very common words are really not useful. They’re rather dull.

Simply

Simply Don’t use this word often.

Pretty

It’s a pretty good idea to use this one sparingly, too.

Just

If your sentence works without it, you just don’t need this word.

That

This is a word that you should only use when you need it for clarity.

Up, down

We don’t care whether you stand up or sit down to write, just write cleanly!

In the process of

We’re in the process of learning to remove wordiness.

As a matter of fact

As a matter of fact, Your skills have improved.

All of

All of Your readers will enjoy reading cleaner copy.

As being

You’ll be known as being a proficient writer!

Being that

Being that Because you’re the best writer in your class, you’re sure to get good grades.

During the course of

During the course of the writing lesson, we learned some new tricks!

For all intents and purposes, For the most part

For all intents and purposes, Our writing has improved.

Point in time

You don’t need to use filler words at this point in time now.

Every word needs to have a purpose in your writing, and there are plenty that don’t contribute anything but clutter. Now that you have a list of common offenders, how many more can you think of? Leave a comment!

How to Use Keywords to Make a Resume Recruiters Notice

Do you tailor your resume to match the job you’re applying for? There are some compelling reasons that you should. You already tailor other things you write to a specific audience, (e.g., emails, term papers, brochures). Why should your resume be any different?

Tips for Writing a Great Resume

Here are a few simple tips on how to write a resume and tailor it to a job description.

Know Your Skills

A good place to start is by making a master list of your skills. But why make a master list if you’re just going to take keywords from the job listing?

The list helps you identify what kinds of job listings to target. Also, it will help you prioritize the skill keywords you will take from the job listing.

So, think back on all of the jobs you’ve had and the skills you’ve learned over the years. As you add them to your list, put the ones you feel strongest about at the top.

By putting your strongest skills at the top, you can see how close you are to being the perfect candidate when you select different job listings. For example, when your strongest skills line up with the skills the recruiter emphasizes in the job listing, there’s a better chance you’ll get called in for an interview.

If you’re worried about whether a skill is relevant, add it anyhow. It’s best to get it all on paper and save the cherry-picking for later.

Mine the Job Listing for Skills Keywords

Carefully read the job listing and highlight any skills the employer mentions.

These are keywords. When a hiring manager first looks at your resume, she will scan it for these keywords. And she will only spend an average of six seconds trying to find them.

That means that you need to put the most important keywords at the top of your resume. Make other keywords eye-catching with embellishments like numbers and accomplishments.

For example, let’s say one of the requirements in the job listing is “excellent customer service skills.” You’ve decided to add it to your experience section as a key responsibility from your last job.

But don’t just write

Responsible for handling customer service.

Add some value.

Spearheaded a customer service initiative that saved the company over $50,000 and resulted in a 10% decrease in returns.

Now the recruiter knows how excellent you are at customer service—$50,000 worth!

Here’s a tip: If you’ve ever cut costs or increased revenue, add that information. If you’re not sure by how much, estimate. Just be sure that you can back up your estimation with proof.

Identify Vital Skills

Try to find two to three other job listings similar to the one featuring the job you’re applying for. Read through them and mark the skills listed. If you find skills that are common across these listings, there’s a good chance they’re either mandatory or highly desirable for the job you’re targeting.

Next, take a trip over to LinkedIn and look at other professionals’ profiles. What skills do they list? How are they similar? If you see a pattern, you’ve figured out which skills are most likely relevant keywords for your resume.

Categorize the Remaining Skills for Perspective

The rest of the keyword skills should fall into one of three categories:

• Job-related
• Transferable
• Adaptive

Job-related skills are necessary for you to do the work at hand. They include things like knowing Java and Python or having the ability to operate a forklift. Chances are if you don’t have most of the job-related skills, you can’t do the work.

Make sure these skills go in prominent places on your resume, like the summary or leading bullet points in your experience section. You want the hiring manager to check them off his must-have list as quickly as possible.

Transferable skills are less important than the other types. They are basic skills that most people have because they carry them from one job to another. They include things like knowing how to create pivot tables in Microsoft Excel. Hiring managers welcome them on resumes but don’t treat them as unique or extraordinary. What they can do for you is flesh out your resume and give you extra value. So, feature them in your skills section.

Here’s a tip: Don’t just write Microsoft Excel.

Add the detail about the pivot tables: Microsoft Excel, pivot tables

Adaptive skills are the most elusive. They are skills like dependability and assertiveness. Usually, they are self-taught survival skills that help us thrive in society.

The very nature of these skills makes them difficult to measure and demonstrate. If possible, pair the ones you feel strongest about with accomplishments that illustrate them. Scatter them throughout your resume where appropriate.

Find Out if You Did a Good Job With Keywords

Dropping your tailored resume into a word generator like Wordle allows you to see which words you used the most. Cloud generators make words bigger when they are used more often in a piece of text. Ignore small words like “at” or “the” and focus on the dominance of your keywords.

If the most prominent words are not your keywords, you may want to rewrite your resume to increase the frequency with which you use those words. Adding more keywords will also improve the chances that your resume will pass an applicant tracking system (ATS) scan. If you need certain keywords to show up more frequently, add them to your skills or experience section.

Tailored Resumes Get You Hired

In an age where we are constantly bombarded and overwhelmed with information, you can’t expect a hiring manager to pick up a generic resume and find it relevant.

It is necessary to customize your resume to match both the job listing and a hiring manager’s expectations. Otherwise, you might just miss that golden opportunity.

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About the author: Natalie Severt is a writer at Uptowork. She writes about how to create successful resumes to help job seekers land their dream jobs. When she isn’t writing, she eats tacos and reads complicated novels. You can find her on Twitter.

The Importance of Proofreading Your Résumé

Did you know that recruiters only spend an average of six seconds reviewing your résumé? You have a very small window in which to wow them, and in this competitive job market, even the smallest mistake can be enough to knock you out of the running. There are three main aspects of proofreading: spelling, grammar, and consistency. We’ll look at each of those below, but first, some sobering statistics about how many errors we found in a sampling of résumés.

Grammarly recently conducted an audit of 50 active résumés on Indeed.com, learned the following:

• There are 5 potential errors on a typical job seeker’s résumé, and most of these issues (nearly 60 percent) are grammatical.
• Female job seekers make an average of 4 grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes in their résumé, while male job seekers average more than 6 mistakes.
• The average job seeker makes more than 1.5 punctuation errors, but very few spelling mistakes (less than one per résumé).
• Job seekers from the southern U.S. make more mistakes (6) on their résumé than any other region: Northeastern U.S. (3.9), Midwest (3.6) and West (3.6).

Since most word processing programs have built-in spell check, actual spelling errors are not as common in résumés. However, most programs don’t recognize contextual spelling errors—you meant to type manager but typed manger instead—so don’t rely entirely on them to do your proofreading.

Grammar errors are much more common than spelling errors. Sometimes these are simply slips of the keyboard—you meant to add a comma but hit the period key instead. Those typos are relatively easy to spot and correct, but there are other, more subtle errors that are harder to catch.

Make sure that you are deploying your hyphens correctly. If a compound adjective (two words that together describe something else) comes before the word it modifies, it should be hyphenated, as in “entry-level position.” However, if it comes after, it should not be hyphenated, as in “the work was entry level.” For a full rundown of compound adjectives, check out this article.

If you are still currently employed at a position, use the present tense. If you are no longer at the position, use past tense. Keep an eye on wandering tenses! Stay consistent within each section of your résumé, and stick with either the simple past (I worked, I typed) or the simple present (I cook, I create).

Although not technically an error, passive voice is considered to be incorrect (The documents were filed, etc). Make sure that the descriptions of your experience are always active: “I filed the documents.”

While proper nouns—names of companies, managers, and schools, for example—should be capitalized, common nouns should not. Some jobseekers have a tendency to capitalize certain common nouns for emphasis, but this is a mistake and should be avoided.

Although it may not immediately spring to mind, catching errors in consistency is an important part of proofreading your résumé. Check to make sure that the dates have all been formatted in the same way (e.g. month/day/year). Ensure that if you bolded your job title, you did so every time. If you notice extra spaces, remove them—this includes two spaces after periods, extra returns between paragraphs, or spaces at the beginning of a line. Ideally, your résumé should be cleanly and consistently formatted, easy to scan, and laid out logically to make the most out of those precious six seconds.

Still not convinced? Check out this composite of the “Worst Résumé Ever” created by Vivian Giang and Danielle Schlanger of Business Insider. They assembled the worst jobseekers sins in one painfully terrible résumé.

How Tina Fey Gets Things Done

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On the heels of our breakdown of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s writing habits, we’re serving up more writing wisdom from none other than the fabulous Tina Fey! The award-winning comedian-screenwriter-actress-producer-author has spent the past twenty years blazing trails as one of the great comic geniuses of our time.

And just in case you’ve been hiking the Amazon or watching only C-SPAN for the past twenty years, here’s a quick recap of her career . . .

In the early ’90s Fey fell in love with comedy and joined the cult of improv as a player at Chicago’s Second City Theatre. Then in 1997 she made the big leap to Saturday Night Live. Originally hired as a writer, she was promoted to head writer just two years later and went on to join the cast and skyrocket to fame as co-anchor of Weekend Update. In 2005, Fey broke out on her own to produce, write, and star in the hilarious TV comedy 30 Rock.

During the 2008 election, she split our sides (and possibly influenced history) when she returned to SNL to impersonate vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Her caustic and insightful autobiography, Bossypants, spent five weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. She’s the mastermind behind Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Oh, and let’s not forget, she wrote and starred in one of the greatest teen comedies of all time—Mean Girls. (So fetch, amiright?)

Read on to learn how you, too, can achieve your goals and aspire to reach the highest levels of writing like Tina Fey!

Keep Writing: Don’t Get Hung Up On Your Failures

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What I learned about “bombing” as an improviser at Second City was that bombing is painful, but it doesn’t kill you. No matter how badly an improv set goes, you will still be physically alive when it’s over.

What I learned about bombing as a writer at “Saturday Night” is that you can’t be too worried about your “permanent record.” Yes, you’re going to write some sketches that you love and are proud of forever—your golden nuggets.

But you’re also going to write some real [bad ones]. And unfortunately, sometimes the [bad ones] will make it onto the air. You can’t worry about it. As long as you know the difference, you can go back to panning for gold on Monday.

Exposing your writing to the public—or even just to friends or coworkers—can be a vulnerable experience.

How will your work be received? Are you on your way to skyrocketing your company’s sales, becoming a thought leader, publishing the next big YA novel? Or will your work be forgotten in obscurity, buried in the digital depths of the Internet?

In reality, this isn’t an “either/or” situation. We all want to be churning out shining gems left and right, but sometimes you’re going to write a piece that doesn’t quite land.

And that’s okay. It’s all part of the process. Maybe you haven’t reached the level you want to be at yet, but you have to start somewhere.

So keep working, keep writing, and don’t let the fear of failure hold you back from going for your dreams.

Deadlines Are Essential: Know When to Put Your Writing Out There

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The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s eleven-thirty. This is something Lorne has said often about “Saturday Night Live,” but it’s a great lesson in not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke until the last possible second, but then you have to let it go.

You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute. . . . You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated.

Did you hear that? We all want our writing to be perfect and amazing, but at some point we’ve got to let it go!

This can be easier for those of us with deadlines at work or school, where another human is counting on us to deliver something. But letting go can can feel more difficult if you’re working on a novel or personal blog post or any project where the timing is completely up to you.

If you’re struggling to put your writing out there, consider:

• Setting deadlines for your work (and sticking to them).
• Having a writing accountability partner (or group) who will hold your feet to the fire and force you to meet deadlines and share your work.
• Reminding yourself that this is a journey, and you probably won’t reach “perfection” the first or third or twentieth time, which is okay because perfection is overrated anyway!

Be Open to Where Creativity Can Lead You

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The thing that always fascinated me about improv is that it’s basically a happy accident that you think you’re initiating. You enter a scene and decide that your character is in a bar, but your partner thinks you’re performing dental surgery.

The combination of those two disparate ideas melds into something that could never have been created on its own. It’s more difficult to do that as a writer, but I’ve found the general philosophy of it to be quite helpful. It reminds me that if I stumble onto something unexpected in my writing, something that I didn’t anticipate or intend, I should be willing to follow it.

The takeaway? Don’t be afraid to try new things with your writing. Keep your inner critic away from your early process.

Give your zany, inner creative writer the chance to frolic, explore, and take risks. Scribble away with abandon, then go back later wearing your editor hat and tidy things up. You can’t polish your golden nuggets if you don’t write them in the first place because you’re too afraid to branch out.

In school we’re taught to stay in line, follow the rules, and memorize the right answer. But creativity isn’t about looking for one right answer, it’s about exploring possibilities. So grab your hang glider and your crampons—you’ve got some new horizons to explore!

Choose Your Battles Wisely: Don’t Get Hung Up on the Morons

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When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.

Life is full of drama, y’all. There will always be haters on the sidelines telling you that you can’t do what you’re doing.

Maybe you’re like Tina, breaking into a field where you’re underrepresented. Maybe you’re trying to climb the company ladder, or establish yourself as a freelancer. Whatever your reality, remember to choose your battles wisely.

You may feel threatened or hurt by the naysayers, but Tina’s right, if that person is not a real obstacle then it’s up to you to move onwards and upwards. Focus on your goals, and work to become an agent for change. You have a message and a mission that people need to hear, so don’t let the morons and fuddy-duddies trip you up.

Are Dictionaries Still Important?

This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.

Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!

If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.

When someone makes a writing mistake, what do you do?

This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.

Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!

If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.