Clarity and Conciseness
I've improved my resume a lot over the past month. It has achieved a very high information/word ratio, and the clarity of my message has increased in tandem.
Now that my resume is as I want it, I'm finding that my brain very much likes trying to say more with less. It's become an enjoyable, challenging game. More than once, I've copied a found paragraph into my text editor to see how much I can reduce it in size while retaining or improving its clarity.
This is so fun, and so effective at improving my writing and even my thinking ability, that I wonder why no one made any real effort to teach this skill in my junior high and high school.
Improving a well-written paragraph has other benefits. To shorten it without harming its message, I need to pay close attention to its structure. The tedium of studying paragraphs superior to my own in hopes their virtues will "rub off" on me is replaced by the intense focus of a predator, looking for weakness in paragraph structure that I can improve upon.
There is an added benefit. Even the most minor, difficult improvement results in a paragraph that is better than the one I started with. This keeps me in good spirits and is a powerful positive feedback loop.
Now that my resume is as I want it, I'm finding that my brain very much likes trying to say more with less. It's become an enjoyable, challenging game. More than once, I've copied a found paragraph into my text editor to see how much I can reduce it in size while retaining or improving its clarity.
This is so fun, and so effective at improving my writing and even my thinking ability, that I wonder why no one made any real effort to teach this skill in my junior high and high school.
Improving a well-written paragraph has other benefits. To shorten it without harming its message, I need to pay close attention to its structure. The tedium of studying paragraphs superior to my own in hopes their virtues will "rub off" on me is replaced by the intense focus of a predator, looking for weakness in paragraph structure that I can improve upon.
There is an added benefit. Even the most minor, difficult improvement results in a paragraph that is better than the one I started with. This keeps me in good spirits and is a powerful positive feedback loop.