So you’ve spent a good deal of time writing out a detailed cover letter for your resume. If you’ve followed the guidelines on this site, then you surely have a respectable draft of a document that details your accomplishments and ambitions as a professional. But before you decide to send that letter out to potential employers, you have to be absolutely sure that you’re submitting the highest quality writing you can achieve. Covers letters are brief, but in those few hundred words you’re expected to put forth a compelling argument for why an employer should consider you above a potential pool of hundreds of applicants. You can’t afford to have any mistakes in your cover letter, period. Your form must be impeccable.
While I can’t tell you what specific content to put into your cover letter, I can teach you a thing or two about how to make the document grammatically sound, polished and well written. Consider these two tips as you go through and edit your cover letter.
Maintain a professional tone
When you read through your cover letter, imagine that you’re reciting it verbatim to a potential employer giving you a job interview. That will give you a good idea of the tone that you want to maintain throughout your letter. You want to sound formal enough to display a sense of professionalism, but conversational enough to convey your personality. It sounds a little counterintuitive, but you want to strike a balance between stiff formality and the kind of tone you’d strike with your closest friends.
A basic way to improve the professional tone of a document is to eliminate any colloquialism, or any informal phrases and words that you wouldn’t use in a job interview. Informal language will make your potential employer think that you’re not mature enough for your job. And this should go without saying, but be sure to get rid of any shorthand. Anything that you’d shorten to fit into a text probably shouldn’t be included on a cover letter for a new job.
Don’t switch subjects or verb tenses abruptly
Now that we have the tone of your cover letter out of the way, let’s focus on your grammar. One of the most common mistakes I see in any form of personal writing is the tendency to switch verb tenses at random. When I say the “verb tenses” of your sentences, I’m referring to their temporal setting. If you use the present tense in one sentence (e.g. “I intend to continue my work in copywriting”), then you shouldn’t suddenly switch to another tense without fair warning. A sentence set in the present tense followed immediately by one in the future tense (e.g. “I did the best I can to improve my writing skills”) might confuse your reader.
Also make sure to avoid switching subjects abruptly. For instance, say you begin a paragraph with the subject “I,” as in “I used the experience at the law firm as a stepping stone into the law field.” The next sentence in your paragraph should not be “you” or “we” unless you’re starting a new thought in a new paragraph. It becomes frustrating for a reader to see multiple subjects floating around the same paragraph, and it could make the difference in the time your employer dedicates to reading your letter. You can easily fix this issue in your letter by checking through it for multiple instances of I, you, we, etc.
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This is a guest post by Kimberly Wilson. Kimberly is from accredited online colleges, she writes on topics including career, education, student life, college life, home improvement, time management etc.