by Mignon Fogarty
Friends and family often ask me to review their résumés before they send them to potential employers, and the most common error I see is that people fail to use parallel construction in lists of accomplishments or responsibilities.
The podcast edition of this article was sponsored by Audible. Get a free audiobook to keep when you sign up for a free 14-day trial at AudiblePodcast.com/gg.
How to Write a Better Résumé
You probably did lots of things you want to highlight for a potential employer. For example maybe in your last job you were responsible for making coffee, decoration hanging, and you ran the office football pool. That's sure to impress them, right?
It will impress them more if you change it so your three grueling duties are written using parallel construction. It's a mishmash the way it is now, the verbs are in different forms and in different places, and the last part (you ran the office football pool) is a whole clause. We can clean it up by making each part start with a gerund—an “ing” form of a verb:
I was responsible for making coffee, hanging decorations, and running the office football pool.
There, much better, each part is a gerund phrase. They match.
Start each item in a list with the same verb form or article.
More Ways Using Parallel Construction Helps You Write a Better Résumé
Although the most common errors I see are using different verb forms or phrase forms, occasionally people will jumble their articles or prepositions.
Here's a sentence that could be better:
My team won best complainers, the most likely to leave early, and least likely to turn off the lights when we leave.
The problem is the article “the” in front of “most likely to leave early.” The first and last items in the list don't have an article in front of them, so to keep your list parallel, you need to either remove the “the” from the middle item or put an article in front of everything.
My team won best complainers, most likely to leave early, and least likely to turn off the lights when we leave.
My team was voted the best complainers, the most likely to leave early, and the least likely to turn off the lights when we leave.
Both versions are correct. You could write it either way; the important thing is that each list item is either bare or preceded by an article.
Again, they match. You want your socks to match when you go to an interview. Make sure you get that interview by double-checking that your list items match.
What Should You Capitalize on a Résumé?
And on a note completely unrelated to parallel construction, the second most common mistake I see on résumés is people capitalizing words willy nilly.
We capitalize words because they are proper nouns—the name of something. That means you capitalize the official name of your department, but you don't capitalize the name of your position when you use it in a sentence. You also don't capitalize words that describe your department, a project you worked on, or your coworkers.
As a salesperson in the Department of Desserts, I handled the gumdrop and jelly bean accounts at the request of the marketing group.
The only words in that sentence that should be capitalized are “department” and “desserts” because “Department of Desserts” is the official name of the department, which makes it a proper noun. There's no reason to capitalize “salesperson,” “gumdrop,” “jelly bean,” or “marketing,” but I see people do it all the time on résumés. Capitalizing unnecessary words doesn't make them seem more important; it just makes it seem like you don't know how to use the language.
