Academic Cover Letters

When you're applying for a faculty position with a college or university, the cover letter is your first chance to make a strong impression as a promising researcher and teacher. Below you'll find some strategies for presenting your qualifications effectively in an academic context.

Purdue University (1998). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters

Action Verbs to Describe Skills, Jobs, and Accomplishments in Employment Documents

These are some words commonly used to describe your skills on your resume.

Purdue University (2004). Careers>Resumes>Glossary

Answer the Four Key Questions

Your resume must persuasively answer at least four key questions to win the interview.

Tech-Writer. Careers>Resumes

The Art of the Developer Resume

Resumes may seem like something of a mundane topic, but after spending the last few weeks wading through resumes from software developers, it is clear to me that most developers need help with their resumes. This impression is backed up by many past resume reading experiences. While I have come across very few truly awful resumes, the majority of the resumes I have read in the last week have been substandard. Only a few have been what I would call really well done.

Read, Daniel. developer.star (2001). Careers>Resumes>Programming

Avoid the Top Three Cover Letter Mistakes!

As a career coach and professional resume writer, I'm often asked 'How important are cover letters to my job search?' My answer is, 'It depends on how long you want to search for your next job.' If you are in no hurry to get interviews, then don't worry about your cover letter.

Walker, Deborah. STC Puget Sound (2005). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters>Business Communication

Business Correspondence and Resumes

This chapter focus on business correspondence-general format and style for business letters as well as specific types of business letters.

McMurrey, David A. Io.com. Careers>Resumes>Writing>Business Communication

Career Resources: Writing a Resume

The Career Center: Writing a Resume section contains information that can be helpful when you are preparing to write a resume.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Careers>Resumes>TC

Cover Letter Tips

A selection of writing samples for cover letters, CVs and resumes.

Carrer Advisor. CvTips.com. Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters>Writing

Cover Letter Writing Blues

Cover letters can mean the difference between your work being read and being tossed callously into the nearest wastebasket. Writing cover letters makes me feel stupid and small, as though I were begging some faceless entity (read: editor) to acknowledge my pitiful existence.

Van Nooten, Sylvia. Writer's Block (1999). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters

Cover Letters That Sell You  

Drake discusses the three objectives of cover letters to work applications.

Drake, Cheryl S. Intercom (2002). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters

Developing Your Resume  

This sixty-one slide presentation takes job seekers through a comprehensive interactive workshop about the drafting and desigining of their resume sections, including the contact information, the objective statement, the education section, the experience section, and the honors and activities section.

Kopp, Bryan M. Purdue University (1997). Careers>Resumes

Do's and Don'ts for Resumes

Keep it simple and easy to read. Do not overuse bold or italic lettering. When sending via e-mail, remember everyone may not have the same equipment/programs that you do.

Raperto, Marie. IABC (2006). Careers>Resumes

Effective Scannable Resumes

The Career Center: Writing a Resume Effective Scannable Resumes section contains information that can be helpful when you are preparing to write a resume. It discusses how many companies are using OCR scanning to pick keywords out of a resume and enter them into a database. This section can help you write your resume so it will allow for effective scanning.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Careers>Resumes>TC

First Impressions--Lasting Results  

Your resume is the first sample of your writing that a manager sees. If your resume is fatally flawed, you might not get an interview. Writing a resume involves determining what to emphasize to potential employers; building a convincing case for your qualifications through how you document your education, skills, and experience; and presenting your resume professionally.

Mazza Panagakos, Denise and Cindy Thornton. STC Proceedings (1998). Careers>Resumes

From Sentence to Bullet: How to Style a One-Page Résumé for Traction  

The one-page MBA résumé has become, in graduate management education, the self-representational document of choice. Sentences are out, bullets are in, details remain. The key is how to detail the bullet to describe, define, and deliver, in non-narrative form, professional achievements and accomplishments. In this paper, I examine samples of raw quasi-narrative descriptions and suggest restyled improvements for single-line bullets that more clearly, precisely, and effectively represent how authors describe their achievements. The raw data come from a data set of some 400 résumés submitted as a task in a studio-based broadcast course on business communication. The authors are mid-level managers in Latin America enrolled in a global MBA program. The paper examines the content and form of the objective, summary, and professional experience sections of the résumé and provides a set of tips for written language use in the résumé.

Staczek, John J. Association for Business Communication (2005). Careers>Resumes>Management>Business Communication

General Resume Template

A template for technical writers developing new personal resumes.

Tech-Writer. Careers>Resumes

The Ideal Resume: Thorough, But User-Friendly  

Smith, a former resume writer for a professional resume-writing franchise, demonstrates ways to improve the usability of resumes.

Smith, Gary M. Intercom (2002). Careers>Resumes

Industrial-Strength Technical Communication  

In the nineties, if an employer took one glance at your résumé and started to fall in love with you, it probably had a lot to do with your long list of software tool skills. Nowadays, most employers couldn't care less about tools. It's all about industry experience.

Davis, Douglas W. STC (2007). Careers>Resumes>TC

Is It Time To Update Your Resume?

If a recruiter called you today with your dream job, would you be prepared to send out an up-to-date resume right away?

Walker, Deborah. STC Puget Sound (2006). Careers>Resumes>Advice

Learn to Write a Resume that Will Get You Noticed  

Your resume could be hurting your chances of landing a new job. Columnist Jeff Davis shares some advice for making sure your resume is one that hiring managers will read.

Davis, Jeff. TechRepublic (2003). Careers>Resumes

The Million Dollar Letter: Some Hints On How to Write One    

This article suggests ways of writing a truly effective cover letter, an extremely important document in the search for a job. First, features gleaned from 13 model letters in technical writing textbooks yield figures on the number of words, sentences, and paragraphs per letter, plus the average number of words per sentence and paragraph, information helpful to those with little or no knowledge of how to write a strong cover letter. Second, the article surveys what the textbook writers offer as advice about the rhetorical principles that should be employed in composing cover letters. One piece of advice given by almost all of the experts is that writers should try to exude an energetic attitude, yet these same authorities do not delineate just how to display such a posture in the letters themselves. Third, examination of the letters reveals that one way that experts insert verve into cover letters is to use verbals, particularly gerunds, participles, and infinitives. In fact, 92.58% of the sentences in the 13 model letters have some type of verbal in them. The advantage of employing verbals is that while they are used for other parts of speech, they still retain the residue of action in their meaning. Fourth, the article describes the results of a survey to determine the acceptance of such constructions in the minds of two sets of readers: first-year writing students and third-year technical writing students. In both groups, more than 75% of the students preferred a paragraph with verbals in it over a paragraph devoid of verbals. Finally, the article suggests "sentence combining" as a procedure for teaching technical writing students how to combine basic sentences into verbals to garner variety and economy, one of the hallmarks of technical writing.

Myers, Marshall. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2004). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters

Online Job Hunt Tutorial

Team Webmonkey reveals where to look for Web jobs, how to tweak your e-résumé, and the best way to interview.

Webmonkey (2003). Careers>Resumes>Online

Power Words for Resumes

A list of verbs one should consider when writing a resume.

Tech-Writer. Careers>Resumes>Writing

Resume Design

This handout offers advice making informed design choices in creating a resume. We also have a sample resume that uses these design principles.

Purdue University (2004). Careers>Resumes>Document Design>Visual Rhetoric