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Using the right type
When designing your resume, stay within appropriate boundaries for your profession and industry. For instance, the CEO for a conservative insurance company should have a traditional-looking resume. A graphic designer for a greeting-card company could have a more creative layout that shows off her aesthetic tastes.
Spacing Out
Think of your resume as a valuable piece of Manhattan real estate where every increment of space must be used. As land is used for buildings, signs, and pathways, use your resume real estate for headings, phrases, and lists. And just as landscaping and parks are appreciated in congested urban areas, white space gives relief to the resume reader's eye.
One way to create white space on your resume is to set generous margins. Here's how:
- In your MS Word toolbar, select the File pull-down menu.
- Select Page Setup.
- Click Margins.
- Set the left and right margins to no less than 1 inch each.
- Set the top and bottom margins to no less than .5 inch each.
Bonus Check
Ever wonder why newspapers use one-inch columns instead of printing across the full width of the page? Short lines are quicker to read than long ones. That's a tip you can use in formatting your resume. Keep your line lengths short, no more than five inches across if possible.
Job-Hunt Hint
In addition to making your resume handsome, white space on your resume may be used by the interviewer as a place to make notes (or possibly doodle) during the interview.
Adjusting the leading with space between demo lines) is version clever way to add white space without eating up too much real estate. For example, you may want to have just a little space (but not a full linespace) between each bullet-point statement to set them apart. Customizing space before or after lines (which are considered paragraphs for formatting purposes) is easy:
- Highlight the paragraph (or bullet-point statement) you want to add space before or after.
- In your MS Word toolbar, select the Format pull-down menu.
- Select Paragraph.
- Click Indents and Spacing.
- Under the heading Spacing, you'll see boxes next to Before and After. Insert a number, such as 6, in either the Before or After box to add space before or after a paragraph. (The smaller the number, the smaller the space will be.)
- Click OK to see the results of your work.
Terms of Employment
Leading (rhymes with bedding) is the space between lines of text. Adjust the leading of individual lines to accent headings and increase ease of reading.
Bonus Check
There are standard tabs programmed into a Microsoft Word document. You can change those tab settings by using the ruler on the screen at the top of your document. Take time to learn how to use the various types of tabs by consulting your word-processing manual. A third white-space technique is to use the Tab key to indent text inorder to create columns or subbullet-point statements.
Resume Reality
Now that you've learned what a good resume design and type style are, it's time to get your resume printed and out in the real world where it's going to work wonders for you. Let's move on to the nuts and bolts of getting your resume out of the printer and into the hands of your next employer!
Terms of Employment
In word-processing jargon, a paragraph is any text that begins after a hard return (pressing Return or Enter on your keyboard) and ends with the next hard return. That means that technically a bullet-point statement is a paragraph.