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.

Make Friday Your Most Productive Day

Is Friday a super productive work day? Or are you starting to wonder why you bother coming in at all? For many of us, getting through the day on Friday (especially the afternoon) can be a real struggle.

Who doesn’t get that #FridayFeeling?

Leaving the Office on a Friday GIF from Scrubs GIFs

After a long week of getting stuff done, we’re just ready for the weekend to begin. Staying focused on work can feel impossible, but indulging in a lighter work day can be guilt-inducing when we expect (or others expect) that we’ll get more work done than we actually do.

What if you could truly enjoy your Friday and still have a productive work day where you’re proud of what you accomplished?

Inconceivable? Think again. Here are four simple strategies you can use to make your Fridays more productive and fun.

1 Schedule Your Day Strategically

Has this ever happened to you on a Friday afternoon?You glance at the clock, it’s 4:30, and you still haven’t crossed the most important To Do item off your list.

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Friday is prime time for procrastination, so do what you can to resist this trap. If you’re planning on dipping out early, the last thing you want holding you back are some serious To Do items—or being stuck in a meeting at 4:00 pm.

Instead of drifting into work late, come in early or on time. Schedule your important projects and meetings for the morning when you’re feeling more focused and energetic. Then save the grueling afternoon for tasks that aren’t as important.

When you’re strategic and intentional about your schedule, you can get your most important work done before that Friday Feeling rolls around in the afternoon.

Productive Friday accomplished? Check!

2 Do the Small Stuff You’ve Been Putting Off

If you’re like me, Friday afternoon is the worst time for tasks that require critical thinking. Good thing productivity isn’t just about the big stuff!

Instead of whiling away the hours on Slack or falling down the Internet rabbit hole, why not channel your restless energy for good?

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Friday afternoon is the perfect time to check off those pesky little To Dos and get things prepped for next week.

Go ahead and answer the last emails in your inbox. Fill out that report you’ve been putting off. Do the online training you forgot about. Touch base with Patty in marketing about that thing. If your desk looks like a garbage heap, do some tidying up so your workspace feels fresh and organized.

Start thinking about next week. Prep yourself on the project deadlines and meetings you have coming up. Get clear on your top priorities for Monday so you can roll into work ahead of the game.

You’ll feel super productive and better able to enjoy your weekend when you have everything wrapped up and ready to go for next week!

3 Set Realistic Expectations

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Clear strategies for a more productive Friday are helpful, but you still need to be realistic about how much you can really do. Between the extra distractions (beer hour, anyone?) and lower mental energy, you might be working at a more relaxed pace.

Maybe you have five projects you’d like to cross off your Friday list, but it’s more realistic that you’ll get only three done before you run out of steam.

Setting realistic expectations will help you enjoy what you’re able to accomplish and not beat yourself up over the things you didn’t get done.

4 Give Yourself Permission to Have Fun

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Letting yourself relax a little on a Friday may feel like an easy choice . . . or it may leave you worried that you’re slacking off and should be getting more done.

The reality is this: when you’re tired and distracted, forcing yourself to make sluggish progress or staying late to eke out a little more on a project is not as productive as you think. You’re not doing your best work.

A better option is to accept when you need to take a break. Give yourself permission to relax. It’s okay to leave a little early to unwind with friends or go to a fitness class, take a walk, catch some alone time at a cafe over lunch.

Maybe there’s a coworker you want to connect with or a creative project you love but don’t normally have time for.

After a long week of kicking ass and taking names, sometimes the best thing you can do for your work and for yourself is to take a step back so you can recharge.

Remember, it’s okay if you don’t disrupt the markets, solve world hunger, or write the next Great American Novel. That stuff will be waiting on Monday, but right now it’s Friday—so take a break!

What are your favorite productivity hacks for getting through Fridays? Come share with us in the comments section below!

New Uses for Old Words

Like an unkeyboardinated tween, you can count on language for boundless creativity – and a seeming randomness that’s hard to keep up with.

We’re constantly adding new words and devising new forms and quirky mashups of old ones. But whether you’re squishing two existing words together to create a new one, or perhaps repurposing a familiar pronoun to be more inclusive, many of the ways we tinker with language follow a few well-worn patterns. Here are some that should be on your radar in 2017.

Portmanteaus

Portmanteaus occur when two words are fused into a new invention that includes sounds and meanings from both. Perhaps the most obvious example in 2016 was Brexit – shorthand for the vote by the British to exit the European Union. Other common examples likely to hold your attention include:

• Sexting – combines the words “sex” and “texting” in a way we hope is self-explanatory, but not, ehrm, sexplanatory.
• Sexile – similar to the above, except here “sex” is paired with the word “exile,” like in this TMI gem: “My roommate’s long-distance boyfriend is flying in that weekend, so I planned a camping trip to avoid being sexiled.”
• Spandexual – no really, we think you have the idea by now, thanks.

Other examples abound from recent years, from bromance to frenemies. A few less obvious ones we rather like include:

• Internest – a nest of pillows and blankets from which one Internets (more on verbing nouns in a moment).
• Unkeyboardinated – awkward at typing or generally, ahem, uncoordinated on the keyboard.
• Askhole – As in, “stop asking so many annoying questions if you’re not going to even listen, you askhole.”
• Abeerance – When a social obligation requires you to show up, but you decide to stay for only one drink, you’re making one of these.

But while portmanteaus are a near endless source of fun new words, the concept is hardly new. For instance, the word “brunch,” that most savory of examples, was coined more than a century ago.

Indeed, as we’ve noted before, the very term “portmanteau” dates back as far as 1871, to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. At the time, the word referred to a suitcase with two sections. As Humpty Dumpty explained the matter to Alice, “You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

While portmanteaus aren’t exactly a fresh innovation, some have argued the ever-growing churn of words and ideas on the web, combined with social-media users’ ceaseless hunger for new ways to express their thoughts, may be accelerating the drive to craft new expressions.

Verbing

Another way we tend to develop new words is by taking existing nouns or adjectives and repurposing them as verbs. For instance, where a circle of professional contacts was once a “network” (a noun), now developing such connections is itself a verb: “networking.”

One current example stems from doing the basic work of being a grown-up, like paying one’s bills, making a nice home-cooked dinner, and packing the leftovers to take to the office for lunch. This, as the dag-blasted millennials now coming of age might say, is “adulting.” (By contrast, the basic pastime of leaning against walls and talking trash outside suburban movie theaters and diners might be deemed “teenaging.”)

As with portmanteaus, verbing isn’t new: that “verbing weirds language” has been a joke for decades. That said, it’s worth noting an apparent uptick in the number of companies being verbed. Here are some examples:

• “I went online to Google something, but got distracted and accidentally wasted an hour Facebooking.”
• “I don’t have those files handy; could you Slack me the links?”
• “The water didn’t seem too deep, so the pioneers opted to skip the ferry and Ford the river.”

(That last one is fake; kudos for paying attention.)

For businesses looking to build their brand, being verbed is desireable. It’s almost as if to say, “This company is so ubiquitous, it’s its own class of activity.” Your humble servants at Grammarly, by contrast, would be satisfied with becoming a mere adverb, as in, “You’d do well to get that report edited Grammarly before handing it in.”

Tmesis

A-whole-’nother way to coin a new word is to jam a different word into the middle of it. This is tmesis (pronounced with an optional tuh, then MEE-sis). Think of it as the turducken of the build-your-own-vocabulary buffet.

Tmesis works well for combining colorful language with superlatives, as in “That is ri-gosh-darn-diculous,” or, “I’m fan-freaking-tastic, and yourself?” Be creative, but not too creative.

Literally

Some words just aren’t what they used to be, since language has a nasty tendency of refusing to stand still or behave as it’s told.

As an example, “literally” was once an antonym for “figuratively.” It meant something was not just a poetic turn of phrase, but actually the case in real life. But literally fell into frequent use as a term of emphasis in sentences like this: “The budget the governor inherited was a trainwreck – literally.”

This is not to say anyone was bequeathed a smoldering mess of twisted steel and debris; rather, the word literally came to mean just its opposite. The curmudgeons among us may grouse, but recent dictionaries have come to reflect this reality.

They

The singular “they,” as we’ve noted, is coming into vogue because it’s sometimes handy to use an all-inclusive pronoun in place of “he” or “her,” particularly when a person’s gender is unknown or irrelevant. While this usage may seem emblematic of present attitudes on gender, it’s worth noting that examples date back centuries, to the likes of Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Mx.

As with the singular “they” above, the honorific Mx. (pronounced Mix) can be useful, especially when you’d like a gender-neutral alternative to Mr., Ms., Mrs., etc.

While according to Oxford Dictionaries Mx. dates back to 1977, of late the New York Times has said the term is quite ready to mainstream [another noun verbed ✓]. Still, the drive toward inclusive language is a worthy one – so you might not want to miss out.

How to Quote a Quote?

• In American English, use double quotation marks for quotations and single quotation marks for quotations within quotations.
• In British English, use single quotation marks for quotations and double quotation marks for quotations within quotations.

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The rules for using quotation marks can seem complicated, but once you understand the basic principles, it’s not so bad. But what do you do when you’ve got a quote within a quote? Read on to find out.

Quotations Within Quotations

Why would you ever have a quotation within a quotation? Lots of reasons. For example, a character in a story may quote someone else aloud.

“Let us explore the meaning of the quote ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’”said the teacher.

The example above uses American-style quotation marks. The main quote is enclosed in double quotation marks. The quote within the quote, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is enclosed in single quotation marks. (The British convention is the opposite; the main quote would use single quotation marks and the quote within the quote would use double quotation marks.) If your single and double quotation marks end up next to each other (either at the beginning or end of the quote), you don’t need to add a space between them.

Quoting a Quote

How do you quote a quote? That is to say, what do you do when you’re quoting material that already contains a quote? The principle doesn’t change. In American English, use double quotes for the outside quote and single quotes for the inside quote. In British English, do the opposite.

Let’s say you need to quote a book for an essay, and the passage you have in mind contains a quote from some other source.

Imagine the original passage from the book looks like this:

I remember our father having strong opinions about many things. Pop was fond of saying “there’s no such thing as a free lunch, Jimmy,” but it seemed a little disingenuous because he wasn’t much of a lunch-eater anyway.

When you quote from this passage, you might say:

In the introduction of the book, the author describes a memory of his father. “Pop was fond of saying ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch, Jimmy,’ but it seemed a little disingenuous because he wasn’t much of a lunch-eater anyway.”

Notice that the quotes around there’s no such thing as a free lunch, Jimmy were double quotes in the original passage. But when you quote the passage, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, Jimmy becomes a quote within a quote, so you should change them to single quotation marks.

Monday Motivation Hack: Keep Moving Forward

Some people spring out of bed on Monday feeling fresh, relaxed, and eager to get back to work. But I’m not convinced those with boundless energy and enthusiasm are of this world. I woke this morning, dragged myself out of bed, showered in a half-dead daze, and made a beeline for my French press to brew some Sumatra roast. For most of us, getting back into the work week can be rough.

As annoying as it is to most of us, Monday has its purpose. It’s a great day to focus on self-improvement. If you take just fifteen minutes out of your morning to focus on a few ideas to put into action this week, you’ll feel less existential dread and more motivation as you start your day. Here’s how to spend those fifteen minutes.

Keep moving forward by ruminating less and noticing more.

We tend to get trapped inside our own heads a lot, ruminating endlessly about things that have happened or might happen. Unfortunately, that can mean getting in our own way, which leads us to feel stuck. Sure, there’s some value in reflecting on your performance and learning from it, or planning for the future. But self-reflection is only meaningful when it leads to positive outcomes. Reflection yields forward momentum when you stop ruminating and start noticing.

Rumination might have you thinking things like Last week was awful. I didn’t get enough sleep most nights, and even coffee wasn’t working for me. I made mistake after mistake!

Can you see any value in beating yourself up like that? I sure can’t. Try noticing what happened last week rather than rolling the events around in your head in a way that churns up negativity.

Here’s what it looks like when you notice rather than ruminate.

When I’m not mindful about getting to bed at a reasonable time, I’m tired the next day. Caffeine gives me a boost, but leads to an energy crash later. I’m more productive when I get enough sleep.

Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. Instead of beating yourself up for last week’s lackluster job performance, you’ve identified a trend. You’ve noticed that your tendency to stay up too late causes you to rely on caffeine, which leads to a crash, which finds you making more mistakes. That’s something you can remedy by developing better sleep habits.

How to Break the Rumination Habit

We all ruminate. It’s a hard habit to break! Fortunately, being aware of your mind’s tendency to be your own worst enemy is the first step toward breaking the cycle.

One of the wisest people I’ve known frequently helped me keep my own rumination habit in check. Any time she caught me beating myself up, she’d ask, “Is this useful thinking?” It would snap me out of my funk and help me recognize that no, laying on a bunch of criticism targeted at myself wasn’t particularly helpful. In fact, it was detrimental.

Noticing, rather than ruminating, leads us to evaluate those tendencies that might be hurting our performance (or even our psyches) in a way that leads to self-discovery, not self-flagellation. If you find yourself ruminating, try these tricks to break the cycle.

• Learn to spot rumination. It’s important to know the enemy! If you’re lost in your own mind, beating yourself up over something in the past or worrying about the future, you’re ruminating.
• Ask yourself “Is this useful thinking?” If you catch yourself ruminating, take a deep breath and consider whether your thoughts are actually helpful. Odds are, they’re only making you feel bad about yourself.
• Practice mindfulness. Make a habit of being in the moment. Mindfulness is a powerful tool for creating peace and positivity. We talked about it a few weeks ago in our Monday Motivation segment on avoiding negativity.

When your tendency to focus on mistakes keeps you stuck, breaking the cycle of rumination can help you move forward. Treat yourself as you would a friend or family member—with kindness and understanding. Noticing the habits you’ve developed that aren’t working for you, rather than beating yourself up for the problems they cause, enables you to make a change for the better.

How to Write Ordinal Numbers Correctly

Is this your first lesson on ordinal numbers? Maybe the second? Or, perhaps it’s the third?

To put it simply, ordinal numbers are used to put things in order. This can be anything from an address to the position a runner finishes in a race.

She lives on 26th Street. He finished in third place.

Ordinal numbers indicate position or order in relation to other numbers.

Cardinal numbers, on the other hand, express a quantity of something.

He had three hot dogs. Her father had five dogs.

Ordinal numbers always have a suffix tacked onto the end; cardinal numbers do not.

• first (1st)
• second (2nd)
• third (3rd)
• fourth (4th)
• fifth (5th)
• sixth (6th)
• seventh (7th)
• eighth (8th)
• ninth (9th)
• tenth (10th)
• eleventh (11th)
• twelfth (12th)
• thirteenth (13th)
• twentieth (20th)
• twenty-first (21st)
• twenty-second (22nd)
• twenty-third (23rd)
• twenty-fourth (24th)
• thirtieth (30th)

Here are a few guidelines for determining which suffix to add to a number. 1. When a number ends with 1, the suffix at the end is -st. 2. When a number ends with 2, the suffix at the end is -nd. 3. When a number ends with 3, the suffix at the end is -rd. 4. When a number that ends with 0,4,5,6,7,8 or 9 uses the suffix -th (Including 10th, 100th, etc) 5. An exception to the rules above is when a numeral ends with 11, 12, or 13, which all use the -th suffix.

These rules and the list above should make it simple to determine which suffix you need to turn a cardinal number into an ordinal one.

Have fun forming your first few sentences with ordinal numbers.

As Well As Comma

The phrase as well as creates one of those situations where you may have to make a judgment call about comma usage. As a general rule, you don’t need a comma before as well as.

As Well As

As well as means “in addition to.”

Please proofread for spelling mistakes as well as grammatical errors.

The sentence above means that you should proofread for both spelling and grammatical errors.

You can also use as well as to make a simple comparison.

I don’t sing as well as Adele does.

This sentence means that Adele sings better than I do.

Comma Before As Well As

Most of the time, you don’t need a comma before as well as. Using a comma turns the thing you’re talking about with as well as into an aside–information that’s less important than the rest of the sentence. That’s where the judgement call comes in. You have to decide whether the things you’re connecting with as well as are equally important or not.

Timmy, as well as Tommy, is a stickler about punctuation.

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In this sentence, as well as Tommy is an aside–something that could go in parentheses. Writing the sentence this way de-emphasizes Tommy and puts the focus on Timmy. Notice that you need one comma before the phrase and one comma after it.

Also notice that this sentence needs the verb is, not are, even though you mentioned both Timmy and Tommy. That’s because as well as is not the same as and. It can’t create a compound subject.

If the part about Tommy is important, the best thing to do is get rid of the commas and change as well as to and.

Timmy and Tommy are sticklers about punctuation.

When you’re making a simple comparison, you should never include the comma.

I don’t sing, as well as Adele does.