Periods At End Of Bullets Resume

When the list is long the.

Periods at end of bullets resume. Many readers and writers assume all bullet p oints should end with a punctuation mark usually a period comma or semicolon but I argue thats not always the case. You do not put or and after the bullet points. This summary statement at the top of the resume should list the main qualifications and qualities you possess that align with the requirements in the job listing.

You do not use full stops within bullet points where possible start another bullet point or use commas dashes or semicolons to expand. No other punctuation is required to separate listed items. Do not use commas or semicolons at the end of each item.

As a professional resume writer with a recruiter background I say leave them off but not for the reason you may be thinking of. If you end each bullet with a dot in one place and omit the dots later in the document it gives an impression of carelessness. Ideally all of your bullet points should fit on one line.

If you finish your bullets with a period then do it all the way through. Garners Modern American Usage a reference manual I respect and use also inserts periods at the end of bullet points if they begin with a capital letter. In many resume resource guides incomplete or fragment sentences are common and end in periods.

The point is that you are finishing a thought as quickly as possible which is the goal of a resume. Im just curious to see what people like to use at the end of each of their bullet point statements. Seeing as your sentences dont have a subject you dont explicitly state that it is you who is doing those things - in a CV this is implied anyway.

However Gregg also uses periods after bullets that are dependent clauses and long phrases. Believe it or not the simple period often gets misused on resumesOf course periods are good to put at the end of complete sentences. When I write a resume with a client I ask my client how he or she feels about the period issue.