Why Writing Skills Matter 101: The cover letter

Here’s yet another reason why basic writing skills are important for everyone: Killian & Company Advertising has a page on their website devoted to “Cover Letters from Hell.”

Along with every résumé we get comes a cover letter. Composing one seems to have a Difficulty Rating of 11, since that’s where we find the most tortured prose ever set to paper. For example:

“I expect the position to pay commissary to that of its value, as well as to the performance completed.”

Or, decode this:

“It is my desire to develop and generate the revolving scheme to filter to the consuming public in.”

Oh, yeah. I love those revolving schemes, especially the ones that filter the consuming public. There’s much more, so go bask in the glow of some truly bad writing.

Comments

[Cat]

What a writing style! Saucy, yet more client friendly than Trizle

http://www.trizle.com/

[Roy Jacobsen]

Hmmm. I took a quick look at the Trizle site, and immediately cringed at some of their word choice: business-focused, empower, enable. Not that these words are automatically bad, but they've been so misused by people who love buzzwords and marketing-ese, that they're like someone who's been sitting near a campfire. They may not have been burned, but they smell that way.