Is the Cover Letter Dead?

The cover letter was once a valuable tool for all job seekers hoping to get by the HR gatekeeper. However, the rise of innovative tech, social media, millennials, and good old-fashioned networking is killing the cover letter.

The only thing missing from the decline of the cover letter is a time of death. In fact, chances are your cover letter won’t even be read, according to Fortune. Nearly 90 percent of hiring managers admit to never reading cover letters.

Interestingly, most job posts require a cover letter despite the unlikeliness of it getting more than a quick glance. Studies have found, however, that cover letters still get read if submitted with a resume.

The cover letter is as out of fashion as Hammer pants and Beanie Babies. Unless a cover letter is explicitly required, it is a waste of time and effort. Here’s why.

Your Social Media Accounts Are the New Cover Letter

It may not come as a surprise, but your social media presence is very accessible. Recruiters know this and they will check out your profiles and activity. Social media is, in effect, the new cover letter, and at times the new resume.

This can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on your digital footprint. When recruiters want to know something about potential candidates, they simply Google them or check their Twitter accounts. Your Facebook photos are far more compelling and revealing about who you are compared to a thoughtfully scripted cover letter.

Old-Fashioned Networking Is Another Cover Letter Killer

Your cover letter may include all the traditional pleasantries, but there is always a more effective way to put your best foot forward. Networking is often far more effective than a cover letter.

In fact, 70 to 80 percent of jobs are never posted online, Matt Youngquist, president of Career Horizons, told NPR. This makes the cover letter a time-consuming effort with little return. Networking is possibly the best and fastest way to land the job you want.

Freelancers Have Saturated the Job Market

Companies large and small, including fresh startups, have all gone the route of the freelancer. Often, a cover letter is not part of the equation when hiring for contract positions.

An estimated 34 percent of the American workforce is composed of freelancers, according to a study conducted by the Freelancers Union. And this is expected to rise to 50 percent by 2020.

The wide range and availability of freelancers has made the cover letter irrelevant. Why bring in new employees on a salary when a freelancer will do the work on a project basis? Freelancers are often more economical for companies as well.

Professional Online Platforms Are a Recruiter’s Dream

If a recruiter needs to fill a position fast, why take the time reading endless cover letters? All the information they need is on a potential candidate’s professional online profile such as LinkedIn. In fact, nearly 93 percent of recruiters use LinkedIn to fill their company’s talent pool.

Professional online platforms like LinkedIn are not only killing the cover letter, they are also putting the resume to rest as well. Many companies even permit potential candidates to apply to a job with their LinkedIn profile.

Don’t toss your cover letter just yet. There is still a place for it in your job hunt as it takes its last fleeting breaths of life. Though the cover letter is nearly dead, it is still required for the many jobs still posted online. However, focusing on your professional digital footprint more than your cover letter may prove to be time better spent.

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Vera Marie Reed is freelance writer living in Glendale, California. This mother of two specializes in education and parenting content. When she’s not delivering expert advice, you can find her reading, writing, going to museums, and doing craft projects with her children.

Top Student Writing Mistakes: The Real “Madness” in Higher Education

According to some estimates, March Madness costs companies up to $134 million in lost productivity — with employees streaming the tournament online, updating brackets, participating in office pools, and more.

Imagine if the United States cared as much about the quality of a school’s curriculum as we do about the caliber of its basketball team?

In keeping with the competitive spirit of the NCAA basketball championship, the Grammarly team created a “tournament” of our own. We reviewed articles from 16 student newspapers at colleges across the country to come up with our own “Final Four,” as determined by the most well-written student newspapers. Here they are:

• The Stanford Daily (Stanford University)
• Statesman (Utah State University)
• Dartmouth Review (Dartmouth College)
• The Prospector (University of Texas, El Paso)

Congratulations to these exceptional student newspapers for the quality writing!

Is quality of writing a predictor of inclusion in the actual Final Four tournament? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, here is an overview of some of the most common writing mistakes made by students using the Grammarly platform.

What types of writing mistakes did you make as a student?

Active vs. Passive Voice—What Are They and How Do I Use Them?

Active voice means that a sentence has a subject that acts upon its verb. Passive voice means that a subject is a recipient of a verb’s action. You may have learned that the passive voice is weak and incorrect, but it isn’t that simple. When used correctly and in moderation, the passive voice is fine.

In English grammar, verbs have five properties: voice, mood, tense, person, and number; here, we are concerned with voice. The two grammatical voices are active and passive.

What is Active Voice?

When the subject of a sentence performs the verb’s action, we say that the sentence is in the active voice. Sentences in the active voice have a strong, direct, and clear tone. Here are some short and straightforward examples of active voice.

Monkeys adore bananas.

The cashier counted the money.

The dog chased the squirrel.

All three sentences have a basic active voice construction: subject, verb, and object. The subject monkey performs the action described by adore. The subject the cashier performs the action described by counted. The subject the dog performs the action described by chased. The subjects are doing, doing, doing—they take action in their sentences. The active voice reminds us of the mega-popular Nike slogan, “Just Do It.”

What is Passive Voice?

A sentence is in the passive voice, on the other hand, when the subject is acted on by the verb. The passive voice is always constructed with a conjugated form of to be plus the verb’s past participle. Doing this usually generates a preposition as well. That sounds much more complicated than it is, because passivity is actually quite easy to detect. For these next examples of passive voice, we will transform the three active sentences above to illustrate the difference.

Bananas are adored by monkeys.

The money was counted by the cashier.

The squirrel was chased by the dog.

Let’s take a closer look at the first pair of sentences, “Monkeys adore bananas” and “Bananas are adored by monkeys.” The active sentence consists of monkeys (subject) + adore (verb) + bananas (object). The passive sentence consists of bananas (object) + are adored (a form of to be plus the past participle adored) + by (preposition) + monkeys (subject). Making the sentence passive flipped the structure and necessitated the preposition by. In fact, all three of the transformed sentences above required the addition of by.

Active Voice vs. Passive Voice—Which Is Better?

There is no question that using the active voice conveys a strong, clear tone and that the passive voice is subtler and weaker. Here’s some good advice: don’t use the passive voice just because you think it sounds a bit fancier than the active voice.

That said, there are times the passive voice is useful and called for. Take “The squirrel was chased by the dog,” for example. That sentence construction would be helpful if the squirrel were the focus of your writing and not the dog.

A good rule of thumb is to try to put the majority of your sentences in the active voice. This is especially true in business.

How to Change a Sentence in Passive Voice to Active Voice

Here is an example of a business communication that could be strengthened by abandoning the passive voice.

An error has occurred with your account, but every attempt was made to remedy it.

That sentence is not incorrect, but it does sound a bit stiff and dishonest. It sounds less trustworthy than it could—almost evasive. Who wants to do business with a company that avoids taking full responsibility by slipping into formal passive voice territory? Face the responsibility head on instead. Own it.

We made an error with your account, but we have made every attempt to remedy it.

To make that sentence active rather than passive, I identified the subject: we. It was “our company” that was responsible.

If there are any questions, I can be reached at the number below.

The structure of this sentence is weak because it doesn’t identify the subjects in either clause. Let’s unveil them. Who might have questions to ask? The person being addressed: you. Who will be doing the reaching (by calling the number below)? It is still the communication’s recipient.

If you have any questions, call me at the number below.

Here’s a tip: What to remember: to change a sentence from passive voice into active voice, identify the subject.

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.