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Writing Effective, Well-Tailored Resumes

Written communication is as important to many jobs as technical knowledge and leadership skills. Whatever your field is, you often have to demonstrate solid writing skills before you can persuade hiring managers that your full range of abilities will benefit their organizations. Problematic writing in a cover letter or resume can sabotage your chances of being interviewed for a job, so we recently wrote an entire book with strategies just for these crucial job-application documents

A Write It Well Client: “All our e-mail improved after your training”

Write It Well client Saima Siddiqui is the Senior Associate Director of Career Services at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Saima says that after Write It Well’s e-mail training, she noticed a big difference in the quality of e-mail that flies around the office at NUS. “There are no more big chunks of text; people use more bullet points,” she says

Punctuation and Eating Your Beets

Missing punctuation can confuse your customers and clients. Clear punctuation may take some extra effort, but it helps readers follow your ideas and realize you care about being understood. Some sentences are simple enough not to need commas — e

Hyphens, Dashes, and Tablet Devices

Readers can get distracted or confused when business writers mix up hyphens and dashes. The following sentences about the new iPad feature a correctly used hyphen and dash: Any company that wants to make a tablet computer that matches the iPad’s $499 starting price has to endure higher costs. As a result, Apple’s tablet-making competitors have flailed — and failed

The Yelp Debut and Too Much Punctuation

You might be better off rewriting a sentence if you get confused about how you should punctuate it. Consider this sentence on the Yelp debut: At an opening price of roughly $22 a share, Yelp is trading at a $1.6 billion valuation —  far smaller than some of the recent Internet offerings, like Zynga or Groupon — but still an impressive debut for a start-up operating in a highly competitive environment that has yet to turn a profit
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