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Looking spiffy on paper
Terms of Employment
Fonts are typefaces, which come in two styles: serif (with the little feet on the characters) and sans serif (without the feet).
Sharp-Shooting Bullets
Bullet points are little dots placed at the beginning of a statement, which help the reader move swiftly through your resume. They let you present your information in bite-sized pieces and avoid unwanted para-graphs.
Here's how to create the bullet point in MS Word:
- On the Macintosh, press the Option and 8 keys at the same time.
- In MS Word for Windows, select the bullet icon on your toolbar or go to the Format menu and select Bullets and Numbering.
There are symbols other than bullet points that can be used to separate statements on your resume. You can elaborate on a bullet-point statement by adding sub-bullet statements. Sub-bullet statements should be indented and should start with a symbol other than the bullet point, perhaps a dash, plus sign, or one of the untraditional symbols mentioned above.
The following resume by Joanne Rainey demonstrates the use of dashes to create indented subbullet-point statements upnder her achievements.
Shady Bars
You may like the look of lines, double lines, bars, or shaded bars run ning across or up and down your resume. Here's how to do those nifty extras if you're working in MS Word:
- Put your cursor where you want to insert a line or bar into your resume.
- In your toolbar, access the Format pull-down menu.
- Select Borders and Shading.
- Under Setting, choose Box.
- Under Style, choose the width.
- Under Preview, click on the icon representing the bottom of the box.
It's that simple, and the results will make you look like a desktop publishing pro.
Horizontal lines and shaded bars can help an employer immediately identify the different sections of the resume allowing him to move through your document quickly. Too many lines, however, can make a resume look cluttered. So use your judgment or consult a friend who has an artistic eye to create the right balance.
Terms of Employment
Point size is a measurement used by typographers to gauge the size of type. The larger the number of the point, the larger the letter, number, or symbol is.
Career Casualty
Watch out for the family of fonts called Times (Times New Roman, New York Times, or any font with Times in its name). These fonts look great, but they tend to print small. If you are using a Times font, go no smaller than 12 point in the text of your resume.