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How to write a good CV (UK version)

Because many of us are often asked to proofread CVs, I thought it might be useful to make some general points about how they should be written. Armed with this knowledge, you can go beyond basic corrections and offer advice to your client about improving his or her CV.

Before discovering my true vocation as a proofreader, I was a job hopper, meandering between various dull 9-to-5 drudgeries. One benefit of my patchwork quilt of an employment record is that I’ve had a lot of practice at applying for jobs, and a good deal of success at securing interviews by submitting an effective CV.

Also, at a couple of the companies that I actually stayed with for a while, I was involved in recruitment, checking the CVs of applicants. This means I’ve seen the process from both sides. I know how to write CVs that work, and what recruiters want to see when they read them, so here are a few of my recommendations.

When you apply for any job, try to put yourself in the position of the recruiter, and imagine what his or her ideal candidate would be like. Then use words and information to suggest that you are that ideal candidate. This means you shouldn’t simply submit the same CV every time you apply for a vacancy. Instead, keep a basic “template” CV and adjust it to suit each job application, giving extra prominence to anything that makes you appear especially well-suited to the post, and cutting out anything that’s irrelevant. Talking of which, my golden rule for writing a CV is “keep it relevant”. Don’t bother to mention any skills or experiences that aren’t applicable to the vacancy.

Fundamentals of writing a good CV

• Design your CV attractively but simply, so that it’s easy to read. Put spaces between the sections. If you need to include any kind of list (e.g. your duties in a previous job), use bullet points rather than full sentences. A CV that is cramped or is typed in a font that’s too small is likely to be binned without even being read. But…

• Don’t make it any longer than two pages. One page is best, if you can fit everything in without making it appear squashed. If you find it hard to comply with both these first two pieces of advice, your CV is too long. Remember, cut out anything irrelevant.

• Don’t be flashy. Avoid graphics, colours, boxes, fancy bullet points or any other silly “showing off” effects. And don’t include your photo, unless you’re applying for a job as an actor or model! Doing any of these things will suggest that your CV is so poor that you’re having to use gimmicks to compensate. A powerful CV will impress by its words alone.

• Use “power words”. These are positive verbs that make your skills sound more impressive. Examples include: achieved, coordinated, created, designed, developed, managed, negotiated… there are literally hundreds of them. If you Google “CV power words”, the 18 million results should give you plenty more.

• Personalise your CV. Using bland clichés such as “I am a team player” or “I have good communication skills” will do nothing to distinguish you from all the other sheep who also quote them. Back them up with personal examples showing how you’ve communicated well, or how you worked successfully in a team.

• Don’t submit your CV without an accompanying cover letter.

Of course, there’s a great deal more to writing a successful CV than the above points, but following them will give you a good start. If you or any of your clients need a comprehensive guide, then try my book Your CV: A Plain-speaking Guide. Yes, I’m afraid it’s time to confess that this entire piece has been a shameless plug for my own publication, details of which can be found at:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-CV-Plain-speaking-Robert-Ginger/dp/1908341130

Well, we proofreaders all have to supplement our meagre incomes however we can.

Robert Ginger is a professional proofreader and copy-editor and lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire. He is the author of Your CV: A Plain-speaking Guide which is available from Amazon. You can contact Robert via his website, www.bobtheproofreader.co.uk.

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Introduction – Checking APA and Harvard citations

I want to talk to you about references — the bibliographic sort that almost every academic paper and book contains at the end — and citations, the callouts for their reference partners. They’re not even a new invention, so at the dawn of the 21st century, I remember thinking: “Why have I had to check these for so long? Why hasn’t anyone tried to make it easier to check them?” I’d sought in vain to find a simple and affordable program to help with checking references and citations. In the information age, there must be something out there to do this, but my searches drew a blank. There were a small number of in-house and commercially available programs to work on references, but these seemed prohibitively expensive, inflexible, and restrictive in their functionality. Most seemed to be bibliographic authoring software to help authors compile reference lists and citations as they prepared their work prior to submission for publication, but none provided a simple solution to check references and citations after the text had been written.

Challenges

With a growing number of in-house and freelance copy-editors, there seemed to be a niche in the market for this type of software. After lengthy discussions with a programmer colleague, we came up with the name “ReferenceChecker” with the following desiderata:

• It should be affordable
• It should be easy to install and use, with minimum prior knowledge of using add-ins in Word
• It should be flexible yet require minimum input from the user
• It should be fast to use
• Its user interface should be clean, simple, and easy to understand
• It should present clear results and point the user directly to the exact place in the text where the discrepancies can be found
• It should understand the character sets of most European languages, including letters with diacritics that are variations on letters in the Latin alphabet
• It should recognize and check the most commonly used referencing systems, APA, Harvard, and Vancouver, and their numerous variants.

Could all this be done? Would it prove too much for a machine, to be able to carry out the manual checking tasks of an experienced copy-editor? We set about programming the code, testing, retesting, and reconfiguring the code many times to produce a working prototype. It worked in the early stages, and with the variety of examples of references and citations, but we soon found variants of names, years, punctuation, ordering, and so on that would warrant revisions to the software. Testing and development took about 5 months; finally, in early 2005, we were ready to unleash the beast into the Wild World Web.

It has been a considerable challenge, though not insurmountable, to iron out problems along the way. Things arose that we didn’t think would arise, and there were less-than-straightforward elements in bibliographic referencing that would require sophisticated code. Talking of code, the software comprises a Visual Basic application implemented in several thousand lines of code. Its size and complexity belie its simple interface and experience for the user; the user shouldn’t have to worry about how big or complex the software is, only how quick and easy it is to use.

Throughout its development, we introduced a number of additional useful features in ReferenceChecker:

• hyperlinked results that could be clicked on or scrolled through to take the user to the exact place in the text where the mismatch was found: either a reference item with no matching citation or a citation with no matching item in the reference list;
• the option to check with or without case sensitivity in author names;
• a feature to copy and paste the results;
• the option to view the results as a list of either (a) every single citation and reference item listed and checked or (b) mismatches only.

21st-century editing

In conceiving the idea for ReferenceChecker, I admit I had a few qualms. Would the “brain” of a machine perform as accurately and intelligently in this case as the brain of a human? When a human checks references and citations, they have learned how to recognize and compare the separate elements that constitute each reference and citation. My underlying apprehension was that if software could do the amount of work that would normally take a human, say, 15 minutes in an average-sized paper in a small fraction of the time, i.e. a few seconds, could this open a Pandora’s box of expectations? The answer is quite complex. By using, and still being in full control of, software to check the parts of a text that can be processed more quickly than by the laborious manual method, the copy-editor can concentrate on other, more important tasks that cannot be done by a machine, while maintaining a high level of accuracy. We’re still a long way off from machines being able to do the complete work of a copy-editor on a text, because of the vast complexities of human written language. With automated grammar, consistency, spell-checking, and text-analysis software, there are frequently false errors highlighted, because the software hasn’t been programmed to “look around” either side of a word or phrase to detect and understand the specific context and meaning intended by the author. In some cases, the software can’t possibly know if a spelling or punctuation is correct or not in a specific context, because it doesn’t have a human’s life experience.

Some examples:

• “man eating shark” or “man-eating shark”? Which is correct in the context of the subject matter? Either could be used, depending on the context. Should the software flag either of these as being incorrect?
• “It’s one mistake” or “Its one mistake”? Either could be correct, with or without the apostrophe, depending on the surrounding text.
• “… his parents, John Allen, and Rose Wood” or “… his parents, John Allen and Rose Wood”? Does this refer to two or four people? It could be either.
• “principal was investigated” or “principle was investigated”? Either is acceptable, but would it be appropriate for an automated checker to question the usage of either of these? Would it be remiss for it not to report a possible spelling error?

We encountered a few challenges while developing ReferenceChecker, and to deal with these, several sets of rules were implemented. There were rules to detect references and citations; rules to parse the references and citations; and rules to extract author surnames and years of publication. A number of “post-processing rules” were then incorporated to clean up the extracted references and citations, ignore spurious names, and make sense of all surnames and years of publication. A final set of rules compared references and citations, and generated the list of mismatches for the user to look through. In so doing, ReferenceChecker has been developed with intelligent design, working in a way as close as possible to how a human would recognize references and citations, that is, if it looks like a citation or reference to the human eye, ReferenceChecker will recognize and check it. It’s heartening to know we’ve saved many people many hours of working time, and to receive feedback and suggestions from our users. For the average full-time copy-editor, who might work on, say, 15 average-sized papers in a working week (e.g. 30 pages of A4 with five pages of references), and estimating about 15 minutes of reference-checking time per paper, we’ve calculated time savings of up to 174 working hours per year—that’s almost five working weeks!

About the author

Paul Sensecall is a full-time freelance (www.pseditorialservices.com) with over 20 years’ experience of copy-editing and proofreading academic material in the areas of science, technical, medical; social sciences and humanities.