Last week was no different, but one résumé in particular stood out from the rest of the bunch, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The front page led with 4 sentences, the first of which contained no less than 44 words and 2 errors – including misspelling the name of a previous agency.
From there, things didn't get any better.
80 words later, and I'd counted another 8 errors. Apostrophes turning up in the wrong places (or not at all), random capitalisation, the odd appearance of an ampersand or two, and commas missing in action or simply dropped into the middle of nowhere.
All I can say is that if you're still struggling with the difference between "who's" and "whose" after 25 years in the communications industry – and as a self-professed writer – then all is not well.
But what also struck me was the complexity of the language for something like a résumé, a piece of communication that ought to be simple, approachable and immediate. I've written here about the fact that using long words does not make you appear smarter (in fact, quite the opposite), and I was also reminded of the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.
This is a test that – as the name suggests – measures how easy it is to read a passage of text, and provides a score on a scale of 0–100. Reader's Digest aims for a score of 65 or more, whereas the Harvard Law Review tends to hover around the 30-mark. So far, this post gets a score of 60.
The 4 sentences on the front page of the résumé achieved a Flesch-Kincaid score of just 16. A pretty ordinary effort when you also consider the number of grammatical errors, and a stark reminder of the power of language, for better or for worse.
I sincerely hope that the author of the résumé finds a role, but I can't say for certain that it will be in communications.
Excellent work, Richard, but do remember that figures below 10 ought to be written as words (‘eight’, ‘two’ and ‘four’ in your article).
ReplyDelete9/10.
;0)
More seriously, I sympathise. I waded through some ‘junior copywriter’ CVs recently, and was staggered by how poor most of them were.
One young man managed to send me a one-line email in response to my recruitment call. Not only did he tell me nothing about himself or why he should get the job (there was no CV attached), he also managed to miss out a comma. If you can’t manage a single sentence without dropping your punctuation, maybe professional writing isn’t the route for you...