Usually, if you keep obsessing over a piece of writing, it gets worse. A word, phrase, punctuation, you can always find something to change, replace or move around. But other than factual or language aspects that are either definitively correct or not, at some point you have to know when to let go. But I found one kind of writing where the editing never ends. Not only do you have to keep editing it but in this case it gets better if you keep working on it: Your resume.
Every time I think I’m done editing my resume, at least I think I won’t need to edit it again for a good, long while, there it comes. One more thing that needs to be updated, added, or improved. At the start of last year, I attended a few different resume writing workshops. Then I got started on implementing the tips and tricks. I thought I was done. But then I learned a few more things. Gained more experiences. And it was back to the drawing board.
Soon after that, I read job descriptions of the roles I wanted and questioned whether my resume lined up with those. More editing.
I read a post that gave me an insightful perspective on resume writing. More editing.
The thing with writing though is that sometimes you’re too far in it to see the whole picture or to recognize things that would be so obvious to someone else. And I’m not just talking about typos. In fact, it’s really the content that gets muddier and muddier and editing yourself becomes harder and less clear.
So, how do you get around that?
Recently, I offered to edit a resume for someone else. I was expecting to spot typos and suggest a few word changes here and there. Instead, all the practice I’d had over the year meant I was able to see the writing in a completely different way. Everything from content, tone and formatting to the use of articles (don’t use articles!) But the thing that was most surprising was that editing another person’s resume got me looking at mine with a lot more clarity than before. It got me to really see the difference between an okay sentence and a strong one. It got me to really think about the experience and the image the words on the page represented as a whole. And I wondered, ‘Was I writing the way I told the other person they should?’
Guess what? I’m making more edits.
If you’re creating anything, you can learn a lot by looking at how others did it. But working on it for someone else you might learn even more. You might start to see things more clearly as you work through them. And helping someone else will help you.
Mariam Sultan 