That title got your attention. And that's what you want your essay to do when the reader looks into your file. Let's examine techniques, other than kitschy titles, for creating interest. Specifically let's look at surprise, irony, and suspense.

 

Surprise -- Start you essay in an unexpected manner. For example, open an essay about your background by starting with yesterday or tomorrow, but make sure you spend most of the essay answering the question and discussing your past.

Irony -- "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." Dickens understood that irony grabs interest and opened the classic, Tale of Two Cities, with that intriguing line. Learn from the master. Are you writing about someone who influenced you greatly? Are you in certain ways different from your mentor? Highlight the contrasts and differences, while saying that he or she was the greatest influence on you. Was your proudest accomplishment conceived in failure? Open with the failure and discuss how that failure led to your later success. Use the irony and contrast inherent in these situations to grab attention and tell your story.

Suspense -- Arouse curiosity by using suspense. Ask a question at the beginning of your essay, but don't answer it until the end.

Implicit in these suggestions: don't start with the common or expected. Don't begin your goals essay or statement of purpose with, "I want to be a doctor because . " or "I was born in . "

Let your essays grab your readers' attention so that they will read your essay because they want to and not because they have to.

Resume Tip of the Month

Resume Tactics That Grab Attention

As life activities go, reading a stack of resumes usually falls somewhere near the lower end of the "want-to-do" list. The document you painstakingly packed with all your accomplishments and aspirations may be given only 10 to 20 seconds to do its job. How can you attract and sustain employers' attention to your skills and experience? The answer varies to some extent with your field. Creative types (graphic artists, writers, illustrators, etc.) may use all manner of exotic design tactics -- two- to three-column formats, graphics or line art, effects such as boxes or shadowing, even unusual paper (colors or patterns).

Job seekers in more traditional fields -- the vast majority -- will have to do their attention grabbing in subtler ways. The font you choose (within conservative limits), the positioning of headers (centered, etc.), the distribution of white space, the use of bold and italics -- all can help your resume stand out. Even simple things like increasing the size of your name at the top of the resume or the understated use of horizontal rules to separate sections can help.

As Susan Britton Whitcomb points out in her book Resume Magic, the key real estate in any resume is the two-inch space around the upper fold of a tri-folded page. What to put there? Headlines work in newspapers and advertising, and they can in resumes too: The highlighted line "Computer Society Award-winning Software Designer with 13 Years' Apple and Sun Experience" can draw the reader's attention to a brief bullet list of skills that encapsulate the message of the resume as a whole. If those bullets are what employers seek they will read the rest of the resume with real interest. When they do, their interest can be sustained by ensuring that the resume includes all the relevant terms and key words specific to the target industry as well as concrete, quantifiable achievements that concretely demonstrate the impact you can have on their organization.

--Paul Bodine, Member, Professional Association of Resume Writers & Career Coaches