Fun with action verbs

Several of us previously employed individuals have managed to lift ourselves off the couch and attend an unemployment workshop, which, if it really wanted to be helpful, would teach us things like how to remain unemployed but get paid for it. This would be a very popular workshop.


But this is not to say that we have not learned important things in the workshop. For instance, we have learned that our resumes need "tweaking" (translated roughly, they stink). To help us tweak them, we each received a bound manual of information that is approximately the weight of a Winnebago. The manual offers help for our ailing resumes, including a list of helpful action verbs that convey to a potential employer what we have accomplished in our careers thus far. From this list we can deduce that potential employers are not interested in knowing that we are accomplished in "having fun," as that does not appear on the list, although we heartily believe it should.


We editors are impressed by this list of action verbs, as our own resumes tend to rely heavily on two verbs: "edited" and "edited some more." In cases where these particular verbs are not adequate to describe what we have done with a manuscript, we might resort to "lit on fire."

So we read the list with some amount of envy, the word "formulate" attracting attention from one participant. "Ooo, that's good," she said. But realizing she was unlikely to ever use this word to apply to her own work, she lamented, "I want to formulate something!"


The action verb list is divided into helpful sections such as "How did you organize something?" and "How did you make decisions?" There was even a section titled "How did you save the day?" on which I was disappointed not to find the action phrase "removed stink bugs from the ladies' restroom." This constituted quite a large portion of our everyday job functioning at our previous company and should, I feel strongly, be duly conveyed.

Our resumes received individual attention from the workshop leader, who no doubt went home from the first session determined to work on her own resume and get another job that has no possibility of contact with editorial persons.

"You would put a colon here," she said to me, inserting two dots after the words "Clients included" in my Freelancing section.


"Um, but that's not grammatically correct," I said meekly. "Colons don't go after a verb..."


I knew this because another way editors "save the day" is by debating, with other editors, proper grammar and style points that no one else believes are important, and we had discussed this very point not long before.


The workshop leader did not appear to appreciate how I was attempting to save the day, and my resume, from grammatical incorrectness. She looked at me sideways, no doubt wondering Dear God, what have I done to deserve this.


She indicated how I could move some items on my resume around, then said, "Again, you would put a colon here -- or not." This was said with heavy and, I personally thought, sarcastic emphasis. She moved on to other participants, seeming to spend more time with non-editors who would not argue with her opinions on colons, but that may have been just my imagination.


Now if only she could show us how to formulate.