The Elements of Resume Style, 2nd Edition

Preface to Second Edition

Paraphrasing oft-amended remarks by American author and humorist Mark Twain: Reports of the résumé’s death are wildly exaggerated. More than a few present-day career writers have claimed 1) the résumé is your obituary, and 2) social media presence is who you are. Both of these claims are absurd, and here’s why.

Yes, a poorly crafted résumé can resemble an obituary, and yet this was equally true way before social media, before the Internet, before personal computing, before the typewriter, and even before typesetting.

Social media—as prolific and sometimes ingenious as it is—follows venerable traditions like oral storytelling, calligraphy, handwriting, and the printing press; the typewriter, mini-computing, the word processor, ...