By: Vault and UNC UCS
Employers may receive thousands of resumes for one position. Because of this, they are often looking for any reason to eliminate a candidate. While resume writing is a creative process that allows writers to “break the rules” when appropriate, some rules should not be broken. To quote Frank Fox, Executive Director of the Professional Association of Resume Writers and Career Coaches, “We have always said that ‘in resume writing, there are no rules . . . except that there should be no typos, misspellings, or grammatical errors.'” To some extent, this also covers formatting, as the general trend is to write tightly and concisely. For example, some broken grammatical rules are acceptable, such as the use of sentence fragments to make the writing crisp. But if you are going to break the rules once, do it consistently; a resume that uses complete sentences in one section and fragments in another can be distracting to the reader. Remember, you are not writing for yourself. You are writing attention-grabbing copy that will show how you can meet the needs of your audience, such as a potential employer, someone offering an internship, or the admissions personnel for graduate school. Click here to review basic guidelines.
You will always need to know how to create a great resume, so for more information, visit https://careers.unc.edu/students/resumes-and-letters to gain more insight on Resumes, CVs, Cover Letters, Thank you letters (Yes! That’s a thing!), and how to create great references.