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Preparing your document for its trip through cyberspace
You've now converted your document into Text Only, and you're ready to make just a few more adjustments before sending it off to the employer.
Terms of Employment
Text Only is very simple formatting (no bold, indents, italics, or varied type sizes) and is ideal for e-mailing and online distribution.
Saving your document as a Text Only file removes all the formatting, which is perfect for e-mailing. Text Only documents are by nature no-frills: no italics, bolds, underlines, tabs, or tables. And typically the font size of all text will be the same. Here's what happened to the letter and resume of Carter Wood when he converted his ocument into Text Only (see preceding example to make a comparison).
Capitalizing on Headings
In your hard-copy resume, you may have used bold, underline, and italics to highlight particular words. If you've used a lot of bold, italics, and underlines in your resume, you may be floored when you save it as Text Only because those extras will disappear. Because Text Only stripped your document of those special effects, use all caps for those words that were previously emphasized on your original. That'll draw attention to important words, and it's perfect for e-mailing! Rest assured, your resume is still going to make a good impression if you compensate with the limited e-mail format ting mentioned in this section.
Job-Hunt Hint
An easy way to make overall changes in your document (such as changing all bullets to dashes) is to use the Search and Replace function in your word-processing progr am.
Bite the Bullet
Bullet points in your original resume were used to break your text into bite-sized pieces. But because some e-mail applications won't allow bullet points in their e-mail messages, you need to come up with an alternative that will transfer well. To make sure your e-mail resume still has the punch of your original, replace bullet points with one of the following:
- Dashes (-)
- Plus symbols (+)
- Asterisks (*)
Use the space bar to place a single space immediately after the symbol and before the first word of the statement. (Don't use a tab as you would in creating a hard-copy resume.)
Job-Hunt Hint
If you have an old version of MS Word (pre-Windows 98), you may not have a "Characters (with spaces)" option in your toolbar. In that case, add the number from Character Count with the number from Word Count. (Because there's one space between each word in a line, the number of words will tell you how many spaces there are in that line.)
Straight Quotes
There are two types of quotation marks: straight and curly.
- Curly quotes look like "this" and are known as smart quotes.
- Straight quotes look like "this" and are called straight quotes.
Your e-mail resume must use straight quotes, because some e-mail programs can't read smart quotes.
Characters That Count
Most e-mail messages have a limit to the number of characters and spaces they will allow per line. This limit is determined by the particular e-mail software being used. The tricky part is that the recipient's e-mail software may have a different character-per-line limit than your e-mail software. If the receiving e-mail software allows fewer characters and spaces per line than your e-mail software, your recipient may see some illogical line wraps when he or she opens your e-mail message. It might look something like.
It's best to cut this problem off at the pass by using very conservative line lengths in your message. My rule of thumb is to limit line lengths to no more than 65 characters and spaces. Here's how:
- Use the Word Count function in MS Word (highlight the longest line in your document, and go to the Tools menu and select Word Count) to check the number of characters and spaces.
- Adjust the margins of your document so that no line is more than 65 characters and spaces long.
Career Casualty
Don't use curly quotes in an e-mail message because they sometimes translate as unreadable symbols (shaded rectangles) on the recipient's end.