How to Adapt Your CV for an American Company

Many people dream of living and working in the USA, but no one would claim it’s easy. To secure a work visa, you’ll need a job offer before you leave – which means perfecting your CV is more important than ever. Don’t simply roll out the CV you’ve been using at home; there are a few key differences you’ll need to know first. Before you hit send, check through this list of tips to make sure American employers can easily see what a great candidate you are.

1 Your CV is no longer a CV!

While languages as diverse as Arabic, Spanish and British English use the term (short for the Latin curriculum vitae) American English prefers the term résumé. It’s important not to neglect this detail as the term CV is used in America, but only in academia.

2 Lose the photo

In many countries it’s normal to include a photo of yourself, and it’s tempting to try to get the employer to picture you in the office, looking dynamic and ready to work. But the USA has strict laws concerning discrimination, so employers can’t be seen to be making decisions based on any aspect of your appearance. You should also remove any details about your marital status, ethnicity, date or place of birth, parents’ names or religion. All you need in terms of personal information is your name, contact details and where to find you on LinkedIn.

3 Keep it short

The name change signals a change of attitude. This is a summary of your skills and achievements, rather than a detailed account of your working life. On average, employers spend only six seconds looking at your résumé! Aim for a single page, or two at the very most. Cut out irrelevant hobbies or unrelated positions you held years ago. After your contact details, recruiters will be looking for:

• Summary statement – a few short, strong statements that sum up why you’re the perfect candidate for this job
• Professional experience – start with the most recent position and work backwards
• Skills – this could include relevant computer programs you can use or languages you speak
• Education – unless you are a very recent or current student, keep this down to a line or two and put it toward the end of the résumé, not at the beginning

If English is your second language, you may be tempted to prove your proficiency by including your TOEFL score. Don’t! Your fluency should speak for itself. But the fact that you are bilingual is a big bonus – list it under skills.

4 Third or first person?

Should you write “Maria has exceptional organizational skills,” or “I have exceptional organizational skills?” This question raises some surprisingly strong feelings. Not so long ago, the advice was to use the third person, and some employers still feel this avoids the impression that you’re just stating your own opinion of yourself. On the other hand, you are stating your opinion of yourself, and as a result many employers hate third person résumés, finding them weird and artificial. Our advice: where a pronoun is unavoidable, use “I,” but in so-called “résumese,” it’s acceptable to avoid pronouns altogether and even to drop the occasional verb. For example: “A manager with exceptional organizational skills. Successfully increased staff retention by 50%.”

Whatever you do, don’t mix “I” with “he/she”!

5 Use action verbs

American culture isn’t big on modesty. Where some cultures would see boastfulness, Americans see confidence and straightforwardness. This doesn’t mean you should make grandiose claims of personal perfection, but it does mean that when explaining your employment history, you should focus on the successes you achieved, not just your duties and responsibilities. You can approach this by avoiding the passive voice and by replacing verbs like “worked on,” “handled” and “was responsible for” with bolder alternatives like “accomplished,” “created,” “increased,” “transformed” or “led,” as well as by giving specific examples of your results.

For example, “handled fundraising” could become “raised $105,000 in new donations in 2017.” Don’t worry about showing off – if you think back, you’ll probably find more relevant achievements than you expect!

7 Avoid clichés

Don’t claim to be “passionate” about your field – is anyone really passionate about, say, data management? And even if your work truly is your passion, the word is so overused that it no longer communicates anything. Instead, tell a story that demonstrates your depth of commitment in your cover letter, or include a bullet point that showcases the results your enthusiasm has helped you achieve. Don’t claim to be a “good team player” or “hard worker” and don’t boast of your “communication skills.” These are vague virtues that employers will tend to assume everyone should have! Give examples of times you’ve taken on extra responsibility, or times you’ve collaborated with others to accomplish something tangible.

8 Don’t forget American vocabulary!

Make sure to use American terms throughout. Even if it feels strange to change your job titles, use “attorney” instead of “solicitor,” “realtor” rather than “estate agent.” Write all dates in the American format: month/day/year. Finally, switch your spell-check to “US English” and do a last sweep to be sure you’re describing your skills as “analyzing” data, not “analysing” it and writing “programs” not “programmes.” And of course, you’ll want to proofread multiple times to be sure that your spelling and grammar is perfect.

9 Nail the cover letter

In some countries a cover letter (or these days, a covering email) is optional, but an American employer won’t even consider an application without a letter – which needs to be individually tailored to every job you apply for. If at all possible, find out the name of the person who will be receiving the letter and address it to them, “Dear Mr./Ms./Mrs. [xxx].” Even if you really can’t find a specific name, don’t lead with “Dear Sir” – female recruiters will not appreciate it. “Dear Hiring Manager” is an acceptable alternative. Like your résumé, your cover letter should be short – no more than one page. It’s the first thing that employers read, which means it’s your best chance to grab the recruiter’s attention: make it clear why you are interested in this particular company, and why they should be interested in you.

Once again, don’t be shy – Americans appreciate self-confidence and will expect you to be proud of your achievements.

Kaplan International English is part of Kaplan Inc., a global education and career services company. With 40 language schools across 6 English-speaking countries, Kaplan helps 50,000 students from 150 countries each year go further with English. Our courses include Business English and preparation for exams such as TOEFL® and GMAT®.

This Is Why You Should Check Your Email in the Morning

Do not check your email! Plenty of people with fancy credentials will tell you to avoid your email at all costs in the morning. Time management consultant Julie Morgenstern wrote a whole book about it. She told The Huffington Post that if you give in to the temptation, “you will never recover.” Personal development writer Sid Savara gives seven reasons not to check it. For starters, the requests in your email aren’t on your agenda of “things to do” yet. If you add them to your plate, you will be distracted from the important things already on your to-do list. Do you want to lose the bliss that accompanies ignorance? On the other hand, just as many experts will tell you to check your email at the beginning of the day. Here’s what they have to say.

Why you should check email

Get it out of the way

The biggest reason to check your email in the morning is simply to get it out of the way. Lifehacker reports the personal experience of Harvard Business Review contributor Dorie Clark: “Pushing email correspondence to the end of the day, I found that I consistently avoided answering certain messages because they required hard choices that my brain found taxing. I realized that if I finally wanted to vanquish those messages straggling at the bottom of my inbox, what I needed most wasn’t simply time to respond; it was the willpower and discernment to make good judgments and respond accordingly.” She recommends setting aside twenty-minute periods throughout the day to handle email correspondence.

Train others to respect your time

Has anyone ever called you or sent you a message asking if you got their email that they sent five minutes ago? In today’s world of technology, people want things fast. But isn’t patience a virtue? When you don’t reply instantly, you might irritate others at first. However, when they receive a thoughtful reply, they might learn to appreciate your diligence. If your custom is to reply to emails in the morning, you can respond within twenty-four hours. That’s a reasonable time frame that gives you time to answer properly. Eventually, your frequent contacts will become familiar with your routine. They will see that you are too busy to be at their beck and call, but you will get back to them in due time. For real emergencies, they can call you on the telephone.

Give yourself time to cope

If you read your emails early, you have time to react. If you wait too late for an urgent email, you might miss an opportunity or not have enough time to meet a deadline. A morning review of emails prevents you from holding up others. If someone needs your reply to progress, you can help out your team productivity by doing your part as soon as possible.

You can avoid “email pressure”

According to an article in The Guardian, London researchers from Future Work Centre reported that workers feel pressured from constant streams of demanding emails. Employees who receive emails on their mobile devices via apps are even more stressed. In Germany, the problem became so concerning that the minister of employment began entertaining “anti-stress” legislation to prohibit companies from contacting employees outside of business hours in non-emergency situations. Though checking email at the beginning and end of the day had the strongest correlation with email stress, the report suggested turning off automatic notifications of new messages. If you check your account in the morning, handle the most important messages right away, and then close the app, you might find that you stay on top of your emails without feeling overwhelmed. Interestingly, personality also influenced how pressured people felt. What a psychologist and a science writer found out about the effects of willpower may surprise you.

Willpower is finite

In the book Willpower, Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney uphold willpower as one of the greatest human feats. According to Tierney, “You only have a finite amount [of willpower] as you go through the day, so you should be careful to conserve it and try to save it for the emergencies.” How does this apply to emails? It’s easy to put off answering them if the responses require research or a long reply. Delay too long, and you seem rude. Answering the tricky ones requires willpower and you have the most of it in the morning, before you have depleted it dealing with other challenges. Perhaps you won’t have weighty replies to write every day, but when you do, the morning is a great time to address them. Tierney also says that willpower is comparable to resistance training. The more you exercise willpower, the stronger your self-control will become. Once you train yourself to handle key communications first thing in the morning, you will have the discipline to avoid spending mental energy on the time-wasters.

How to do it right

Writer Laura Chin tells us how to check emails without zapping our mental energy. The process starts before you even power up your laptop. She quotes NeuroLeadership Institute director David Rock: “If you can’t recall what your goals are, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to scan the environment for things relevant to your goals.” First, define your objectives. When you scan your email later, you will be able to zero in on important messages and make a decision how to handle each one.

Next, open your inbox. Remember these two words—discernment and willpower. Channel your top priorities as you scroll through your new emails. Use your judgment to decide which messages are most important. Open them and respond immediately or flag them as high priority. Next, use your willpower to close your browser. Anything less than critical can wait until later in the day.

Do you feel that sorting critical from unimportant drains too much of your time? Try an email organization service, such as Unroll.me, which groups low priority messages together so that you can concentrate on the important stuff. Outlook has recently implemented a similar service. It’s called focused inbox. The system responds and adapts as it observes which contacts you interact with the most. It also filters forwards, newsletters, and bulk emails into a separate tab that you can read in your leisure time. Besides automatically deleting spam, you can set “rules” to keep only the latest copy of overly frequent newsletters.

You will stress yourself out. You will get distracted from your daily objectives. You will waste too much valuable time. These are some reasons people may tell you that you should never check your email before lunchtime. However, many experts have found that clearing away important emails in the first part of the day will free up your brain for other matters. People will learn that you are busy, but you will answer within a reasonable amount of time. And you will build up your willpower as you answer only the key messages. What’s the bottom line? No one can tell you which philosophy is best because you must take into account your personality and circumstances. What time works best for your job? What method makes you feel the least stress? When do you work most productively? No one will knock your choice if you are capable and competent in your job.

Why Is the Oxford Comma a Heated Debate in 2017?

If you stare awhile at the string of characters that a sentence comprises, the squiggles lose all meaning. That humans somehow manage to agree on the use of these symbols well enough to communicate at all can seem miraculous.

But what about when we don’t quite agree—when it seems a writer has added a superfluous, bafflingly out-of-place comma, perhaps, or inexplicably used the wrong pronoun? Maybe they’re simply mistaken. Or maybe they’re in the vanguard of a futuristic linguistic trend that, decades or centuries hence, will be widely embraced and regarded as correct.

Our language is forever evolving, and 2017 was no exception. Two key authorities on proper usage—the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style—both made modernizing tweaks in their latest updates.

Examined closely, these offer glimpses into the past and future: “Often people think of language shifting over centuries,” says Grammarly copy editor Brittney Ross, “but some of these happened pretty quickly.”

We’ll give a rundown of a few of the recent changes that felt consequential, and then delve into one particularly contentious stylistic faultline we’re still watching—the Oxford comma.

Both style guides are through with capitalizing “internet” and “web.”

Associated Press editors made this move last year, and the Chicago Manual has now followed suit. Not to make anyone feel old, but if you remember the sound of a dial-up modem, you’ve witnessed the arc of these terms trending from exotic to mundane. Same goes for this one:

It’s now email, not e-mail.

Chicago Style lagged a few years after the AP made this shift, but it’s now unanimous—no hyphen required. Similarly:

AP Style now has an entry for esports.

The e is not a typo; we’re talking about competitive multiplayer video games. One could argue that 2017, the year of Starcraft: Remastered, approximates a 20-year anniversary for esports, which have now become commonplace—and so lucrative that popular streamers on Twitch have their own agents.

AP editors also added an entry for autonomous vehicles.

It will likely be years before you get a chance to ride in a self-driving car, but in the meantime, journalists can’t stop thinking about them. (Guilty.) Just don’t call them driverless unless there truly isn’t a human onboard who can take the wheel.

They can now be singular—sometimes.

AP and Chicago Style editors both cracked this door open in 2017, but neither yet seems ready to charge fully through it, prompting the Columbia Journalism Review to declare “it’s the middle of the end for the insistence that ‘they’ can be only a plural pronoun.”

The style guides allow for a singular they when referring to someone who doesn’t identify as he or she, but they also note you can often just write your way around this by reworking the sentence. Here are highlights from the new AP entry:

They, them, their — In most cases, a plural pronoun should agree in number with the antecedent: The children love the books their uncle gave them. They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy. However, rewording usually is possible and always is preferable…

In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun.

Whether this shift heralds the widespread adoption of what’s known as the “epicene they,” we’ll have to wait a few more editions and see.

Whither the Oxford comma?

No discussion of warring (okay, not really) stylebooks would be complete without considering the Oxford (or serial) comma. For the uninitiated, that’s the last comma in a list of three or more things, as in this example:

“My goals for 2018 are to learn how to use commas like a champion, to run a half-marathon, and to get good at poaching eggs.”

Whether that last comma is necessary is hotly debated. It featured in a 2008 lyric by the band Vampire Weekend that might be politely paraphrased as “Who gives a hoot about the Oxford comma?” And this year a single Oxford comma was even the subject of a court fight with millions of dollars at stake.

Chicago style recommends its use in almost all instances, while AP style leans somewhat against it. The AP’s position is squishy, though, as it recently noted in a series of tweets that began “We don’t ban Oxford commas!” Rather, they say you should use it when it adds clarity and ditch it when it’s nonessential.

As AP Stylebook lead editor Paula Froke told a roomful of colleagues this spring, “The stylebook doesn’t ban the use of a serial comma. Whether you put it in at all times is a different debate.” That’s hardly a hard-and-fast declaration, but the Oxford comma is divisive, as anyone who’s served as a copy editor at a student newspaper can attest. Brittney, Grammarly’s resident style maven, puts it this way:

“Oxford commas are like the Ugg boots of the punctuation world. People either love them or hate them or don’t know what they are.”

Brittney notes that Grammarly is pro-Oxford comma, in part because many long-timers (“the OG Grammarly users”) have voiced fondness for it. “It’s really carried over into our blog, social media, emails,” even in settings where AP style might be more typical: “We’ve kept the Oxford comma just to keep things consistent.”

And consistency, alongside clarity, she says, should be more important than pitting one stylistic tribe’s abstract symbols against another.

“When it comes to AP vs. Chicago style, I think a lot of people forget the importance of the word style. The important thing to remember is when the style isn’t working for you, you should do what works.”

From Pens to Keys–The Complete History of Writing Tools

Writing isn’t what it used to be.

That is, writing is no longer an ink-stained task of scrawling on parchment. Getting your thoughts down is faster and easier than ever. Indeed, as voice-recognition software continues to improve, using your fingers to bang out sentences on a keyboard may soon look charmingly quaint.

Here, at a glance, is the evolution of the technology that shapes how we write.

Writing by hand

Writers in bygone centuries had to dip reed or bamboo pens, ink brushes, or feather quills into ink, then place them on papyrus or paper. This notoriously messy process prompted the invention in 1636 of a reservoir pen made from two quills. One was sealed with a cork and held the ink, which was squeezed through a tiny hole.

By 1827, a fountain pen with an ink chamber in the handle had earned a patent in France, but it wasn’t until 1888 that the first ballpoint pen, featuring a tiny moving ball in a socket in the tip, followed suit. Next came felt-tip pens in the 1960s, rollerball pens in the 1970s, and erasable pens in 1979.

In recent years, sales of that other erasable stalwart, the pencil, have fallen on hard times, although colored pencils have exploded in popularity, thanks to the advent of adult coloring books. Meanwhile, pen sales continue to rise slightly.

Typewriters

The first commercially successful typewriter was invented by Americans in 1868. Just a few years later, in 1875, Mark Twain dashed off an admiring letter to his brother:

The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don’t muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper.

How best to operate such machines was controversial at first: Should the user type with just two fingers, or would eight be more efficient? And should one’s gaze be fixed on the buttons or on the page? But the arrangement of the keys – the now-familiar QWERTY design – was widely embraced, and it has barely changed since.

The QWERTY arrangement owes to the work of Christopher Latham Sholes, whose flawed early attempts placed the letters alphabetically in two rows. This led to frequently paired letters, such as “st” and “th,” mashing close together and jamming the machine. So, collaborating with an educator name Amos Densmore, Sholes rearranged the letters according to their popularity. At first this confused typists, but with fewer jams, it ultimately made for a smoother writing process.

First digital, then mobile

Typewriters were widespread for roughly a century before giving way to the rise of computers. Apple, RadioShack, and Commodore all began manufacturing keyboards for their models in the 1970s. (For a throwback, check out this ancient RadioShack commercial for the TRS-80.)

With technology’s inexorable drive toward the smaller and sleeker, the late 1980s offered an early glimpse of what would be recognized today as primordial text messaging. Devices like 1989’s Motorola MicroTAC 9800X promised typing on mobile phones, albeit with a multi-tap approach that meant each number on the keypad mapped to several letters of the alphabet – what’s known as an alphanumeric keypad.

By 1993, the IBM Simon delivered the world’s first full QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen; in 1997, the Nokia 9000 Communicator followed as the first such device with a push-button keyboard. Since then, laptops have supplanted desktop computing. Now, roughly a decade into the iPhone era, smartphones appear poised to obviate many people’s need for other computers altogether.

Talking with machines

Before Siri, there was Audrey, a 1952 Bell Laboratories speech-recognition system that could understand only digits.

Because computing was still in its infancy at the time, this technology evolved slowly; IBM’s “Shoebox” machine could understand 16 words spoken in English in 1962, but adding hundreds of additional entries to the vocabulary of machines was a decades-long process. It wasn’t until 1990 that Dragon introduced a consumer-targeted speech-recognition product, Dragon Dictate, for a whopping $9,000.

Until fairly recently, such technologies plateaued at around 80 percent accuracy. But in the last few years, Apple and Google devices have made typing by voice easier than tapping words into a screen, and this technology looks increasingly crucial as competitors like Amazon, with its Echo device, also crowd in. Such gadgets not only sift your words out of any surrounding noises but also analyze the linguistic context to better understand precisely what you’re saying.

Is handwriting obsolete?

As machines continue to improve, is old-timey ink on paper bound the way of the dinosaur?

One survey found hundreds of people who said they hadn’t written a single thing by hand in over a month. And while current U.S. educational standards don’t require cursive, lessons in keyboarding are mandatory, down to grades where students have barely learned to write by hand. Indeed, even as many of us aren’t sure what drawer we last saw a notepad in, we now spend hours each day texting and writing online.

Of course, longhand still has its advantages; studies suggest it’s a better way to take notes than on a laptop. That’s not just because computers can be an endless source of distraction, either. Rather, researchers found that when you take notes by hand, because you can’t keep up with everything that’s being said verbatim, you instead reframe it in your own words, prompting deeper thought than rote transcription. There is also evidence that writing letters out cements the ability to recognize those characters, both for children learning to read and for adults studying foreign languages.

Whether you still like the feel of pen on paper or prefer the glow of a touchscreen or a machine that takes dictation, you’re still getting your ideas down and communicating, albeit in different ways. And that’s really been the point all along, says Anne Trubek, an author and former professor at Oberlin College, referring millennia-old forms of writing on clay tablets:

What we want from writing – and what the Sumerians wanted – is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts,” Trubek wrote. “This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: we want more time to think.

So what about you? What’s your favorite way to capture an idea in writing?

It’s Time to End Grammar Trolling

During a recent discussion here at Grammarly HQ, someone on the team asked a very good question: is there actually a difference between correcting someone’s grammar and being a grammar troll?

As a copy editor by trade, I have a strong opinion on this one. Yes! Of course there’s a difference!

A good editor, a caring teacher, or an upstanding grammar lover offers corrections that are helpful, polite, and appropriate. A grammar troll insults, mocks, or tries to embarrass another person for making an error. It’s time for that to stop.

But the Internet is destroying proper English! the grammar trolls whine. Everyone is just too stupid! Somebody has to draw the line!

Actually, English is doing just fine. Ask any actual linguist. And everyone is not too stupid. Misspelling a word, making a grammatical error, or even writing a sentence that’s hard to understand doesn’t make you stupid. But insulting someone for making a mistake does make you a grammar troll. And a jerk.

I don’t care! Part of me dies every time I see the word IRREGARDLESS, cry the grammar trolls.

Wow. Aren’t you special.

Consider this: Maybe the person on the other side of the screen is a nonnative speaker who is trying hard to learn English. Maybe it’s someone who speaks a dialect of English that’s different from your own. Maybe they have a different educational background than you do. They could have a disability that makes writing or typing difficult. Maybe they do, in fact, know the difference between to and too but accidentally mistyped.

Ugh, my eyes are bleeding, the grammar trolls sneer. You just used the singular “they.”

Yep! I do it all the time—proudly. So far, exactly zero people have died because of it.

PEOPLE? The Elements of Style clearly states that it should be PERSONS.

Listen, Strunk and White were full of baloney. They couldn’t even identify the passive voice correctly.

You’re a moron and I hate you!

That’s what it really comes down to, isn’t it? Grammar trolls claim that they just want to uphold the standards of proper English. But if that were true, they’d offer polite, respectful suggestions instead of contempt. Why would I change what I say and write just because of some rude, angry stranger? Why would anyone? Grammar trolls don’t want to fix anything. They do what they do because they feel smart when they shame others.

But what if you really do just want to help people write better? What if you’re convinced the typo on the sign in the window of your favorite diner is hurting business? What if you enjoyed someone’s blog post, but there’s a typo the writer missed? What’s a well-meaning grammar lover to do? Here’s what you do: BE NICE. Don’t be rude. Don’t be mean. Don’t be condescending. Just be nice. Tell someone about the mistake if it’s important, and if it’s not, let it go.

If you’re not sure how to be nice, or if you’re a penitent grammar troll without a lot of practice showing kindness, read on. We’ve got all the tips you need in one handy infographic.

Now go out there and give grammar lovers a good name. And if you have a tip for fighting grammar trolls, share it in the comments section!

A Brief and Glorious History of the Interrobang

Imagine you need to write down a phone number, but you don’t have any paper handy. What would you use? Some scribble on a receipt, a napkin, or even their hands. Others repeat the number mentally until they locate a sheet of paper. It’s true; necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, people often generate creative solutions if they need something not readily available.

In 1962, the president of an advertising agency, Martin K. Speckter, found himself in need. He lacked a punctuation mark suitable to express excitement and disbelief simultaneously. Of course, exclamation points are always associated with excitement. However, what if ambiguity or doubt accompanies a strong emotion? Other writers address the issue by ending phrases with both a question mark and an exclamation point, as in the following phrase: Why do you think we need new punctuation?! Mr. Speckter saw no need to invent a new punctuation mark from scratch. Why not combine a question mark and an exclamation point? The parent punctuation marks already had one thing in common—the dot beneath them. Logically, Speckter retained this feature in the fusion of the two marks. He merged the top sections by centering the vertical line of the exclamation point through the question mark. The interrobang’s name is also a combination of two parts. “Interro-” is from “interrogative.” “Bang” is printer’s jargon for an exclamation point. Voilà, the birth of the interrobang!

The Economist explains that Speckter envisioned the interrobang adding “nuance and clarity” to rhetorical questions. In the 1960s, refrigerators that dispensed ice were new technology. Consider how punctuation changes affected his advertising copy for this refrigerator feature:

What? A Refrigerator That Makes Its Own Ice Cubes? What! A Refrigerator That Makes Its Own Ice Cubes! What‽ A Refrigerator That Makes Its Own Ice Cubes‽

Remington Rand, a former typewriter company, applauded Speckter’s creation as the modern way to signify credulity. Numerous magazines and newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, reported the new arrival. Typewriter companies began including interrobangs in their metal typefaces. Had a glorious new day dawned for writers‽

No. Like dogs described as “all bark and no bite,” interrobangs generated buzz, but without a significant impact. Writers continued to use question and exclamation marks, along with the rest of the familiar punctuation canon. Was no one brave enough to embrace the interrobang? Was this curiously incredulous symbol destined to fade into obscurity?

Speckter died in 1988, long before he could see the fate of his pet project. As recently as 2012, Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook punctuated a sentence with an interrobang in his decision on Robert F. Booth Trust v. Crowley. But interrobang usage is a rare occurrence; the symbol is relatively unknown by people outside of the writing field. Nevertheless, it’s not totally extinct. The State Library of New South Wales and Punctuate! Theatre in Alberta use interrobangs as logos.

Why did the interrobang fail to establish a foothold as a punctuation mark? No one can say for sure. Perhaps it has to do with the way language develops. To illustrate, imagine you coined a new word in an article. You couldn’t force other authors to adopt the word in their own writings. Even if people used the word for a while after you published your article, it would be difficult to predict whether the word’s usage would be enduring or just a fad. Punctuation marks are subject to the same uncertainty. Henry Denham’s question mark became widely used after the 1580s. Twitter launched the hashtag into popularity in 2006. Other proposed punctuation marks died out completely. That’s the nature of language development!

Have you fallen for the interrobang’s charms? Several fonts, such as Candara, Lucida Sans Unicode, and FreeSerif, support it. If you’d like to use it in Google Docs, click Insert and select Special Characters from the menu. Next, type “interrobang” in the search field. Decide carefully when and how you will use the interrobang. This glyph might be fun to introduce to your friends, but in some contexts it may cause more confusion than it’s worth.

The next time enthusiasm and disbelief strike simultaneously, remember all your options. You can decide between an exclamation point or a question mark. In informal settings, you can use them together. Or, if you want to conserve space, you can take advantage of the multi-functional interrobang.

If You Want to Know How to Apologize, First Do This…

If you want to succeed at apologizing, start by telling yourself you’re awesome.

The advice sounds counterintuitive. It’s common knowledge that if you want to make a real apology, the kind that’s meaningful and sincere, you have to start by setting aside your ego. But that’s easier said than done, because research shows that not admitting we’re wrong is pretty emotionally satisfying. Often, when we try to make apologies we end up mounting a defense instead.

Why We’re So Bad at Apologizing

We’ve all heard apologies like this one:

“Hey, I’m sorry you’re upset. I didn’t mean to suggest that your input doesn’t matter, but when you were speaking during the meeting I was trying to process my own thoughts, which is why I interrupted you. I apologize.”

Eeee-yeah. That’s not an apology; that’s a justification for bad behavior.

Let’s break it down.

What the apologizer said:

Hey, I’m sorry you’re upset.

Translation:

I don’t like it that you’re mad at me.

What the apologizer said:

I didn’t mean to suggest that your input doesn’t matter, but when you were speaking during the meeting I was trying to process my own thoughts, which is why I interrupted you.

Translation:

The thoughts I was formulating were more important to me than what you had to say.

What the apologizer said:

I apologize.

Translation:

Sorry, not sorry.

Good people sometimes behave badly. There’s a difference between acting like a jerk in the moment and being one full-time. Unfortunately, when you’re faced with the need to own up to jerk-like behavior, your brain has to work overtime to convince you that you did something wrong, and that’s not a pleasant experience.

We’re terrible at apologizing because we don’t want to feel bad about ourselves. We have an innate need to preserve our positive self image. Because of this, setting aside our egos long enough to make a sincere apology may seem easy enough in theory . . . but it’s a lot more difficult in practice.

Of course, failing to apologize effectively can be toxic to workplace and other relationships. We tend to resent and dislike people who can’t own up to their mistakes. Those who always deflect the blame are challenging to get along with.

How to Use Self-Affirmation to Apologize . . . For Real

There’s good news, though. We become much better at apologizing when we remind ourselves of our own good qualities just before we approach someone we’ve wronged to admit that we screwed up.

In 2014, Karina Schumann, a Stanford University psychologist, published a research paper demonstrating that self-affirmation leads to better apologies. She discovered that people who practiced affirmation were less likely to be defensive and included more elements of an actual admission of wrongdoing in their apologies.

Apologizing begins with saying a few positive words to yourself. A one-size-fits-all affirmation won’t work here, though—you have to make it personal. Think about your sources of self-worth. Maybe you’re really good at your job and generally well-liked. Maybe your parenting skills are off the charts and your kids are turning out awesome. Or it could be that you’re creative and full of ideas. Whatever it is, have a little chat with yourself about it before you step up to apologize. It could go something like this:

I’m good at relating to people. Here at work, my colleagues often turn to me for advice and guidance because I’m open-minded and kind.

When you think about what makes you feel good about yourself, you’re disarming your defenses. Now you’re ready to apologize.

Elements of a Perfect Apology

Because you know that your mistake was a momentary lapse and not a long-term value judgment, you can be sincere. Find a quiet time when you’re less likely to be interrupted and then address the person you’ve wronged.

• Say you’re sorry. Not, “I’m sorry, but . . .”, just plain ol’ “I’m sorry.”
• Own the mistake. It’s important to show the other person that you’re willing to take responsibility for your actions.
• Describe what happened. The wronged person needs to know that you understand what happened and why it was hurtful to them. Make sure you remain focused on your role rather than deflecting the blame.
• Have a plan. Let the wronged person know how you intend to fix the situation.
• Admit you were wrong. It takes a big person to own up to being wrong. But you’ve already reminded yourself that you’re a big person. You’ve got this.
• Ask for forgiveness. A little vulnerability goes a long way toward proving that you mean what you say.

Now, instead of the lukewarm apology above, your apology might look like this:

I’m very sorry for the way I behaved in the meeting. It was unacceptable for me to interrupt while you were talking. You must’ve felt like I didn’t value your contribution. I realize that I struggle with impulse control, so I’ve asked people to call me out if I interrupt them during conversations. I really do want to hear what you have to say. I was wrong, and I hope you can forgive me.”

It’s as simple (and as difficult) as that. No justifying your bad behavior, no making excuses or blaming someone or something else, and no minimizing the hurt you caused by saying “I didn’t really mean it” or “I was just kidding.”

Owning up to your own bad behavior is never easy. But, if you bolster your self-worth before you set out to apologize, it doesn’t have to be soul-crushing, either.