Use Parallel Grammatical Flow in Bullet Points

Comments (0)

An important technique to enable your reader to interpret your Summary/Profile section as a story is to make it parallel, as though each bullet point is completing the same sentence. This kind of narrative flow helps readability enormously. Imagine that each Summary/Profile bullet point answers the question, “Who are you, and what can you do for our organization?” and finishes an unstated but understood sentence that begins: “I am a(n)…”

Let’s see how this formula works in practice:

  • [I am a] Seasoned systems analyst with strong commitment to time and resource budgets, new-business development, strategic planning, innovation, technology trends, customer-service needs, and close collaboration with sales and marketing during development.
  • [I am a] Competent problem-solver who resolved sales and shipping issues by creating internal customer-care system and saving 20 percent on shipping; researched and delivered Web conferencing service for sales that saved 30 percent of travel budgets.
  • [I am a] Visionary innovator who partnered with another programmer to create pioneering language-learning software that earned national attention; served as lead analyst for revolutionary legal document generating and tracking product.
  • [I am a] Technical guru who provided direct support for successful million-dollar negotiation with major print vendor and completed many successful major conversions from mainframe to mini-computer systems.
  • [I am a] Strong communicator who was voted best specification writer - with least number of re-writes - by programmers and their managers.

You’ll note that the story-based grammatical structure of these parallel bullet points goes like this: [Adjective] [noun] [connecting words] [phrase describing skill/strength/expertise] [supported by quote, example, numbers]


Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.

Leave a comment

Tell_me_Cover.jpg

The new, improved edition of the book, Tell Me About Yourself, will be released in April 2009 and is available for preorder on Amazon.

About This Blog

This blog serializes the first edition of the book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers (shown below). It is a blog-within-a-blog, and its parent blog is A Storied Career.

Storytelling-that-Propels-Careers_smaller.jpg

December 2008

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31