Literary Legs

Unsolicited Cover Letter Advice for Job Seekers

I give talks at local universities here in the DC area on writing-related topics, and a few weeks ago I was at American University's Washington College of Law talking about how to write an effective cover letter that will get graduates noticed in the job search.  Since I know that some law students read this blog, I've included some tips below.  Of course, these pointers really apply to any job in any discipline.

Tip #1: It's not what the firm can do for you.  It's what you can do for the firm.  Law firms are not charities. Only charities are charities, and even they probably don't care how working in their office will make you a better writer, leader, organizer, researcher, whatever.  Of course, they care to the extent that if you are a better writer, you'll do good work, but that's kind of assumed.  Avoid sentences like, "If given the chance to work at your firm, I will be able to develop my skills as a..." Instead, discuss how your skills will make them more productive.  And be specific. 

Tip #2: Write your cover letter so that no one else in the world--and I mean no one--could have had the same experience.  Only your name can go at the bottom.  What I tell students is that almost anyone can write about their variety of leadership positions, ability to delegate, task management skills, blah blah blah.  Don't just tell your readers that--show them how you have done these things.  As my fifth grade teacher said, "Specific is Terrific."  Your cover letter should be like your fingerprint: no one else in the world can say the same thing. 

Tip #3: Don't repeat your resume.  That's why you have a resume.  Instead, elaborate on the most important points.

Tip #4: Proofread until you can proofread no longer.  You would think that a perfectly proofed document merely puts you on a level playing field, but that's not true.  Most cover letters contain mistakes.  If yours is flawless, it will stand out.  Remember, in a competitive job market, prospective employers look for reasons to disqualify you.  A smaller pile makes their job easier.  Don't make it easy for them.

Tip #5: Similar to tip #2, write to be read.  Write something that is engaging.  I always tell soon-to-be graduates (and the same thing goes for people applying to graduate school) to imagine the worst-case scenario: your reader is looking at your cover letter at 4:30pm on a Friday, before a three-day weekend at the beach.  She is antsy and can't wait to hit the road to beat the traffic.  Make her stay in her seat. 

Tip #6: Avoid these words: self starter, highly motivated, multitasker, team player, strong work ethic, works well with everyone, strong communication skills.  And any boilerplate phrase.  These add nothing and are minimum requirements for any job you are seeking.  No employer has ever seen the phrase highly motivated and thought, "Well, I wasn't going to hire him, but he DID say he was highly motivated.  Where's that phone!"

What Runners and Writers Can Learn From Joannie Rochette at the Winter Olympics

Have you ever had a bad day affect your run?  Or perhaps the stress of the day weighs on your mind so much that concentrating on that interval workout is difficult? Well, from now on you have no excuse.

Forget Lindsey Vonn and her bruised shin. The unquestioned toughest athlete of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is Joannie Rochette from Canada.  Two days after her mother died of a heart attack--she had come to Vancouver to see her daughter skate--Rochette had the performance of her life at the short program.  An only child, Joannie and her mother were very close, and Rochette responded by skating to a personal best score that put her in third place after the short program (watch performance here). On Thursday, she skated well enough in the long program to earn a bronze medal (watch here). 

 

Let's think about this for a moment from an athletic perspective.  The fact that she can even walk--much less skate in the Olympics and give the best performance of her career--is a testament to her superhuman mental toughness.  If you have ever lost a parent or anyone close to you, you know the feeling: that haze that surrounds you those first few days.  Normal day-to-day activities can be impossible.  The fact that Rochette could push through the haze and skate, not to mention medal, is astounding. Her singular focus is one of the reasons why she is an Olympic athlete in the first place. Rochette talked about that focus in an interview on the Today Show, and I was struck by her comment that to stay focused, she "just tried to be in the bubble, like I was going to war." (This is probably the only time you'll see figure skating compared to war, by the way.)

Her performance also speaks to Rochette's ability to block out all distractions, if that's what we must call her mother's death.  How many times have you let a crappy day get in the way of a good run? What amazed me is that there are certainly some days when physically I am not at my best--and that's just for a lousy 45 minute run in the neighborhood.  On those days, it's easy to want to pack it in. But her performance also, of course, speaks to the therapeutic benefits of exercise.  I am sure that she needed that routine to help her cope.

But we can also learn about writing from Rochette's performance, or actually from NBC's coverage of Rochette's skate. Fortunately, their commentary during her routine on Tuesday was understated.  Actually, it was not stated at all: the three commentators said nothing during the whole thing (well, to be honest, Scott Hamilton was probably bawling, so he was unable to talk anyway), and even as she broke down in tears afterward and tried to collect herself, they offered only a few sentences. What could anyone possibly say in a time like this?  Nothing, of course.  But they didn't need to.  What we saw was plenty powerful.  Any cliche-ridden sentences would have been overkill.

So what do we learn from NBC's understated commentary?  First, we must see NBC's performance as a text.  And not just a text, but a persuasive text. To see it as such, all you have to do is ask yourself if, at the end of the performance, you were persuaded to cheer for her, to want her to win. Assuming you don't have a heart of stone, this was probably easy to do. So the televised performance, then, was just a set of facts (legal writers: that would be the facts section of your brief).  And those facts spoke for themselves.  We needed to adjectives, no adverbs, no ineffective intensifiers telling us that this was the "performance of a lifetime" or that "this was an amazing display of courage."  No overt persuasion was needed in order to get us to appreciate the moment. 

In writing, especially persuasive writing, brevity is best; restraint wins out every time.  Show, don't tell. Of course, it helped that part of NBC's team was Tom Hammond, the understated NBC track and field announcer.  Hammond didn't need to tell us that Rochette's performance was gutsy, heartwrenching, and pure grit.  We saw it, and telling us these things would have been belaboring the obvious.  As Chris Chase said on the Yahoo Sports Blog, "It would have been easy for NBC to go with the cheesily narrated, soft-lit puff piece about the relationship between Rochette and her mother. But producers smartly realized that there was no need to manufacture drama in this tale. It had it all. The producers let the story tell itself, and it succeeded."  Though it should be noted that Hamilton could not resist himself after her Thursday performance, saying, "I've never seen such a superhuman amount of courage, determination.  What an inspiration." But even this was hardly hyperbolic.  

They didn't need to provide the narrative.  It was there for us on the ice. I didn't need anyone to tell me that it was emotional or heartwrenching, or that Rochette was tougher than any of us could ever hope to be.  NBC showed us, and that was plenty.

Kevin Pollak Tells Attorneys Why Adverbs Are Bad

I recently wrote about why the word clearly is such a worthless intensifier in any type of persuasive writing.  In legal writing especially, it adds nothing to one's ability to persuade.  No judge reads the phrase clearly mistaken, for example, and thinks, "Well, I didn't think that your opponent was mistaken, but since you told me that he was clearly mistaken, I have to agree with you."

Clearly is an adverb, and there are those who say that adverbs are ineffective intensifiers in general because they are so vague.  They can also be bad because they accompany wimpy verbs.  For example, instead of she ran quickly, why not just say she sped?  The latter example is also more concise.

Of course, I am just a lowly English PhD offering you my advice.  You're probably much more likely to listen to a celebrity spokesperson give you a tutorial on why adverbs are often ineffective.  Especially when that celebrity spokesperson is a Hollywood actor who happens to be an attorney.  Or at least plays one in the movies, as Kevin Pollak does in A Few Good Men  (click on the link for the video, which I am unableto embed).  He discusses how the phrase strenuously object has no more punch than plain ol' object.  Accoording to Pollak's character, the judge is not likely to say, "Wait, you are not just objecting, but strenuously objecting?  Well then, let me take a moment to reconsider."

This is Clearly Overuse

One of the common traps into which attorneys fall when advocating is the use of the word clearly.  Eliminating this word is one of the easiest revisions to make, since it means nothing.  If you use clearly, take it out.  Even better, don't start using it in the first place.  Clearly is an ineffective intensifier.  No judge reads a brief--or for that matter, no one reads any piece of advocacy, legal or not--and says, "Well, your opponent says that the evidence 'proves his guilt,' but since you said that the evidence 'clearly proves his innocence,' you must be right."  In other words, clearly never pushes your readers one way or another.  They do not say, "You said that something was erroneous, but had you said it was 'clearly erroneous,' I would have supported you.  That's a whole different story!" 

But don't take my word for it.  Here's what Chief Justice John Roberts told the Northwestern University School of Law back in 2007:

"We get hundreds and hundreds of briefs, and they're all the same," Roberts told a crowd of eager law students and faculty members last week at the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. "Somebody says, 'My client clearly deserves to win, the cases clearly do this, the language clearly reads this,' blah, blah blah. And you pick up the other side and, lo and behold, they think they clearly deserve to win."

In short, clearly smacks of desperation.  I was reminded of this in a recent article by Alec MacGillis and Paul Farhi in the Washington Post entitled "In Obama's speeches, one favorite phrase: "Let me be clear.'" MacGillis and Fahri discuss Obama's overuse of this set-up in his speeches. They write that "in a presidency in which everything is murkier than Obama could have imagined, the 'let me be clear' preface has become a signal that what follows will be anything but."  Has Obama used the phrase so often that it is now cliche, a metaphorical device that once was to be taken literally but through overuse has lost all meaning?  

In the beginning, when he was still a presidential candidate, Obama used the device to say, "Listen to what I am about to tell you.  Sometimes what I say might be opaque, but I tell you this with no trace of ambiguity or shred of doubt."  MacGillis and Fahri say that once Obama became president, he used the phrase to defend against his detractors, to rebut them when things were really not that clear.  His opponents saw the phrase "as a sign of indecision to follow."

Of course, the other problem with overusing the phrase "let me be clear" is that it implies that there are times when he is not being clear, when he is not as assured or unambiguous or decisive. In his November speech announcing the troop increase in Afghanistan, Obama pronounced his clarity eleven times.  Not only does he risk tiring his audience with the phrase, but he also risks removing the power from the phrase when he really does mean to be clear. 

To sum: don't overuse any stylistic technique or rhetorical device.  When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing. 

 

A Lesson in Writing With Style: Using the Isocolon

The best tip for improving your writing: read everything you write out loud.  You'll catch weak areas--awkward sentences, unintended repetition, punctuation and grammar mistakes, poor sentence construction--that you would never catch reading silently. 

Good writing, as I've said before, is euphonic: it sounds good. One way you can achieve euphony is through isocolon, a method of parallelism in which the clauses in a sentence are of equal length.  Everyone likes harmony and parallelism, and balanced clauses are easy to read since they reinforce these two concepts.  Probably the most famous example is Caesar's veni, vidi, vici (which is also a tricolon, or the use of three parallel members).

So imagine my glee when I found this fantastic example of isocolon in Nick Paumgarten's essay in the January 4 issue of the New Yorker entitled "Food Fighter." It's a profile of John Mackey, the Whole Foods CEO.  Here's the sentence:

"Depending on where you are on the spectrum of epicurean cultural politics, you may consider Whole Foods to be a righteous grocer or a cynical con, a prod to self-improvement or a gateway to decadence, a neighborhood boon or a blight, a force for social good or a place to pick up chicks."

Let's break this down.  Each item in the four pairs below contains the identical number of syllables on either end of the coordinating junction or:

• a righteous grocer or a cynical con: 5 syllables
• a prod to self-improvement or a gateway to decadence: 7 syllables
• a neighborhood boon or a blight: 1 syllable (you have to use boon and blight here)
• a force for social good or a place to pick up chicks: 5 syllables

This, my friends, is what good writing looks like.  When we talk about good writing having style, this is what we mean, and it's tangible examples like this that teachers of writing--on any level--should be showing their students.  Your use of grammar and punctuation can be flawless, but you are nothing without style. 

A Disinterested Account of an Execution

My post two days ago on subtle bias in a death penalty article elicited considerable dialogue.  The post was not intended to be--as some perceived it--an attack on left-wing media bias.  What I tried to show was that unintended bias is almost impossible to overcome, despite our best intentions.  For example, saying that someone was "electrocuted" is a much more graphic way of saying someone was "put to death."  Perhaps a writer may intend no difference in meaning, but to me there is a difference in how these two terms are taken.

Similarly, writers use angle of vision. They are in complete control of what the reader sees--and does not see.  And this absolutely impacts the reader's perception of an event.  For example, had White simply written that "Elliott was strapped to the chair, the switch was thrown, and five minutes later he was dead," such a sanitized version probably would not have moved many people.  However, had he gone into greater detail about Elliott's convulsions as the current flowed through his body, the bodily fluids streaming from his mouth and skin, the smoke, and other sensory images, many people would have been repulsed by what they perceive as barbaric behavior.  This is angle of vision: same event, different versions.

Josh White, the author of the Washington Post article I discussed on Monday, wrote a follow up blog post, a first person account of Larry Elliott's execution.  White was one of the witnesses, and I think he does a fantastic job of describing an emotional experience with impressive disinterest.  This is what White wrote about the moment the current hit Elliott's body:

Another officer, concealed in a room adjacent to the death chamber, hit a button marked “execute” on a machine that was described as being about the size of a domestic clothes dryer.

It was clear when the electricity hit Elliott, as his body jerked bolt upright in the chair and his hands appeared to tightly grip the oak arms. A large blister formed on the inside of his right knee, just above the electrical contact. Smoke rose from both his leg and his head. Spit bubbles formed below the left side of his face mask, near where the corner of his mouth would have been.

This is a strong piece of writing about the moment a man dies (or is killed, depending on your view, right?).  There is not much here that gives away White's position.  Remember: White has witnessed a pretty graphic death.  It would be easy to descend into hyperbole, but he writes just the facts.

If you teach argumentative writing, a good classroom exercise would be to take a passage (like the one above) and make it more persuasive by adding details to alter the angle of vision.  If you have a particularly morbid curiosity, plenty of websites can explain just what happens to the body when the "execute" button is pushed. 

Subtle Bias in a Death Penalty Article?

Few issues are as difficult to write about from an unbiased perspective as capital punishment.  The debate invokes a lot of passion when a person's life hangs in the balance. (See here for my recent post on print media's varying reactions to Manson family member Susan Atkins' death.)

Reporters who cover executions no doubt are susceptible to the emotions that accompany seeing someone die. Still, they must cover these events in an impartial fashion.  And try as they might, sometimes we can still see elements of subtle bias in their reporting.  The biased language is probably not intentional.  From an argumentative or legal writing perspective, performing a close reading of a text like this can help uncover subtle or hidden biases in your opponent.

Last week in Virginia, Larry Elliott was executed for the murder of a couple in 2001.  Elliott, a former Army counterintelligence officer, denied that he was the killer.  A close reading of the Washington Post's coverage of his execution can be an instructive lesson in hidden, and quite possibly unintended, bias.  I have no idea if the author of the piece, Josh White, supports the death penalty (though White said in a blog post, "Let me say upfront that I do not have strong views on the death penalty in general."  I find this hard to believe).

First, let's look at the narrative structure. We open with a two paragraph lede, the five W's of the actual execution.  The third paragraph, however, paints a somewhat sympathetic picture: a confused Elliott, hardly defiant, strapped into the chair: "Instead of making an oral statement, Elliott said he didn't know how much time he had to speak, so he gave a written statement to his attorneys." 

The next three paragraphs detail the statement in which he professes his innocence.  In this statement, Elliott says, "In this great country, we should not arrest and convict innocent people of any crime, let alone capital murder, nor should we kill innocent people as the Commonwealth of Virginia has done today." So far, then, this is what we have: a confused man not able to comprehend why he is being executed.

A Good Example of Evasive Language: Did Daniel Snyder Really Apologize?

This week Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins, tried to calm the masses here in DC by offering an apology for the dismal performance of the team this year.  

But did he really apologize? 

Snyder said he was apologetic. But he never apologized.  And that is the difference between direct discourse and evasive language.  He described his state of mind using an adjective, but we never actually saw him commit an action. 

This is what Snyder said:

"And I think we have an opportunity the rest of the season to hopefully get it going. But to date, we've let everyone down -- including ourselves. We know that. We're just apologetic."

Look at the final sentence: "We are just apologetic."  What Snyder is describing is not an action but a static state of being. In other words, there is nothing active in what he is doing--he just is.  Good writers know to avoid the weak to be verb (am, is, are, was, were). Instead, they use concrete, workhorse verbs that vividly describe an action.  The to be verbs, on the other hand, are neither actionable nor tangible.

It's much better to use a verb that you can picture happening. I can't picture someone in a state of apology, but I can picture someone apologizing.  Had Snyder said, "We apologize," it would have been much more direct. 

But Snyder did not want to be direct.  He did not want to be vivid. Instead, he wanted to be evasive and vague, and he certainly was not willing to be humble and contrite. Standing in front the cameras, had he said, "We apologize," Snyder would have displayed a deliberate, tangible action.  Instead, he used language that merely described an intangible and internal state that's impossible to witness. I give Snyder credit for his deft use of the language. 

While this is not an example of passive voice, it is an example of one way persuasive writers can minimize responsibility if it's something they need to do. 

 

Can You Speak in Comma Splices?

Today's Wall Street Journal contains this sentence in an article about electronic mats that can charge multiple electronic devices simultaneously:

"The wireless-transmission efficiency is never better than a copper wire, that is not possible," says Menno Treffers, chairman of the Wireless Power Consortium.

In print, the quote contains the bane of all grammarians: the dreaded comma splice, when a comma separates independent clauses.  And I am sure that the WSJ will receive emails from people citing this sentence as further evidence of the erosion of writing skills, an erosion which will no doubt lead to the decline of civilization.

But let's not damn the above comma splice just yet.  When you read, you subvocalize (that's the voice in your head when you read silently).  And marks of punctuation like the comma and the period are meant to mark intervals of time, or more precisely gaps of time when we stop reading.  So in the sentence above, we are meant to read the two clauses quickly, which is no doubt how they were spoken.   One possibility--and I have no way of knowing this--is that Treffers is a non-native speaker of English.  Perhaps his native tongue is one in which long sentences are more common, in which case he may have meant it as one sentence.

Of course, no one speaks in punctuation marks, so it's impossible to clean up spoken text when it's transcribed.  When someone is talking to us, we hear just a string of words, not sets of discrete clauses (in fact, we don't even hear the gaps between the words themselves, but our brain is able to process these groups of sounds as discrete words). Really, all we often hear is one long run-on sentence, but reporters obviously put punctuation marks where they deem fit and where they would make the most sense to the reader.  From a grammar point of view, the above sentence is wrong.  But from a stylistic point of view--how it's meant to be subvocalized--it's fine with me, because the author of the article wants us to read it as it was spoken. So I don't consider this incorrect. 

A Newsweekly Claims, Without Irony, That Newspapers Are Irrelevant

Oh, the irony.  It takes cajones for a newsweekly to put out a column--online or otherwise--proclaiming that we should let print newspapers die because they are no longer relevant.  Yep, you heard that right.  A writer for Newsweek says that print newspapers have lost their usefulness.

I will not argue with Daniel Lyons' idea in "Don't Bail Out Newspapers--Let Them Die and Get Out of the Way" that newspapers are facing extinction.  But the only thing deader than the newspaper on my doorstep is the Newsweek in my dentist's office, so Lyons' call in Newsweek is hilariously ironic.  The only thing less relevant than a newspaper is a newsweekly.

If you teach writing in any form on any level, Lyons' piece is ideal, made-for-classroom material.  Have your students read this piece and spend a class session discussing how to refute the opposition by poking holes in logical fallacies.  It's not that of Lyons' claims are that outrageous; it's just that the support he gives is so flimsy.  Among the claims cited by Lyons:

• "Now, new companies with names like Politico and Huffington Post and The Daily Beast and Gawker are beating newspapers at their own game. The new guys are faster, and often better. They're leading, with newspapers chasing behind." Gawker?  In my best John McEnroe voice: You cannot be serious!  Gawker is a gossip site, and while the others are slowly coming around with original reporting, they still have a fair amount of aggregation from print media news sites.  

• "But I recently canceled my two morning papers—The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading." Newspapers should die because Lyons got tired of carrying them, and sometimes put them right in the recycle bin without opening them?  If Lyons is relying on blogs to steer him to the articles worth reading, isn't he still spending time looking at blogs to tell him what to read?  Is that any faster than just reading the paper?