Bull's Eye Business Writing Tips

Tip # 166: The resume Cover Letter:

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will help you improve your business writing.

A cover letter is an introduction, a sales pitch and a proposal for further action all in one. It gives the reader a taste of what's to come -- not by simply summarizing the resume, but by highlighting the aspects of your background that will be most relevant to the reader. A cover letter also demonstrates that you can organize your thoughts and express yourself clearly and appropriately; in other words, it reflects your communication skills and, to some extent, your personality.

Cover letters are typically one page documents. Like lots of things in life, they have a beginning, middle and end: usually an introduction saying who you are and why you're writing, followed by a sales pitch of what you have to offer and then a closing in which you propose steps for further action. These three components often amount to three or four paragraphs, but there are no hard and fast rules about exactly how you break up the information.

Portions of this article were excerpted from the book Cover Letters (of The Princeton Review Job Notes series) by L. Michelle Tullier. Random House/Princeton Review Books, 1997.

Rewrite the following wordy sentences by making them more concise:

1. The medical exam that he gave me was entirely complete.
   
2. John asked his friend Sally, who was a good, old friend, if she would join him and go along with him to see the foreign film made in Japan.
   
3. It will be our aim to insure proper health care for each and every one of the people in the United States.

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These business writing tips brought to you by:
Bull's Eye Business Writing 
10 Easy Guides for Getting to Your Writing Target
By Gloria Pincu, M.A. , President of Basic Learning Systems, Inc.
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Here are some books on business writing that I recommend. Bull's Eye Business Writing is also available from Amazon.com. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, author, Lynne Truss The Everything Resume Book by Steven Graber On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , by William Knowlton Zinsser  The Gregg Reference Manual, by William A. Sabin  The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, White, E. B. White  How to Take the Fog Out of Business Writing, by Robert Gunning, Richard A. Kallan (Contributor)  More books on business writing and other business subjects  (available from Amazon.com).

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Contact Gloria Pincu at Basic Learning Systems, Inc.

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