On the Horizon -- Original Oil Painting by Steve Henderson of Steve Henderson Fine Art

To get started on your resume, sit down at the keyboard or with a pad of paper and write out everything you can think of about yourself and your job and education history. Where did you go to school? What did you study? When did you graduate?

Over the last 10 years, what jobs have you held? What were your positions? Were there specific duties that you had?

Can you speak any foreign languages? Do you have specific computer skills? Can you type? Do you work well with people? Do you have writing skills? Speaking experience?

Write down everything, and synthesize from there. It's better to have more information than less, with the corresponding ability to winnow down the excess.

Let's say that you worked as assistant manager at HappyDay grocery. You might list it like this:

Assistant Manager • Happy Day Grocery
Dayton, Wa • 1997-2010

Worked extensively with public as well as store staff. Ordered inventory; oversaw scheduling of employees; published in-house newsletter. Trained new employees; performed light accounting duties.

Notice that the "I" is implied and left out. The listing of duties is an addendum to the job itself, necessary to describe more of what you are and what you do. If you write in the past tense ("worked," "ordered,") then write everything in the past tense. If you write in the present, then write it all in the present -- just be consistent. (As they say, it's okay to be wrong now and then, as long as you're consistent about it.)

If many of your duties in various jobs are the same, consider starting the resume with a Summary of Skills, either in paragraph or bullet form, listing out your proficiency in computer software, management experience, people skills, office duties, whatever it is that you have done a lot throughout your career and don't want to keep repeating after each job.

As far as the actual layout of your resume, remember that white space is a good thing. Your margins can be generous, and space between headings and descriptions within keep the body of the page from looking like chunks of black ants filling the area. Even if you have a lot to say, give your viewer's eyes a chance to rest. Think of yourself when faced with a printed page that has no paragraphs, but just one line after another of type. It gets exhausting.

If you list something, maintain consistency of form: order inventory; maintain books; tidy shelves is consistent, because each item in the list is stated in verb/noun format; order inventory; book maintenance; shelves are tidied is not, because the first item is verb/noun; the second is adjective/noun; and the third is passive construction.

Punctuate consistently as well. Within a list, you may or may not put a comma before the final conjuntion (speak and write Spanish, English, and German) - just pick one way of doing it and do all the lists the same way.

Make sure that there are no typos, grammatical errors, or misspellings anywhere on the resume. Even one small error leaves a bad taste with picky people like me. To this end, print off a copy of your resume and read it with pencil in hand. After you have gone through the entire resume, word by word, start at the last sentence and go through it again, backwards. You will be amazed the things you catch when you do this.

Look for space issues, as in, two spaces between words instead of one -- this is one of those hyper small things that you can catch when you read your resume backwards.

Ask a friend or relative to look through your resume and ask questions on what they see.

If you have an aspect of your work life that looks negative, such as a lot of jobs in a small amount of time, consider dropping some of the less important jobs or adding together similar jobs into one entry. As far as dates go, it is not necessary to list month and year; year alone will work, especially if the job lasted 10 months and you really don't want to advertise this fact.

Community service and volunteer jobs are valid jobs, by the way, even if you didn't get paid. They provide experience and required you to be on the spot as if you had earned a paycheck.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but this with Parts One and Two should give you enough to get started. Good luck, keep your head up, and believe in yourself.

Surf at Twilight -- Original Oil Painting by Steve Henderson of Steve Henderson Fine Art

Okay, so you've got the header on your resume, describing your name, titles, and contact information. It looks great, and now there's the small matter of filling up the empty space underneath.

For a general resume, just remember EEE -- Education, Experience, and Extras, although you don't necessarily head them this way, especially the last one. For a resume specific to an artist, you are putting in the same information, only you might divide it into headings such as Shows Entered, Representation/Galleries, Awards, Memberships/Affiliations, Collections, and so on.

If you are strong in a certain area, say Shows Entered, then showcase this; conversely, if you are not in a single Collection anywhere, then don't worry about putting this in. Beneath the headings, arrange the information by highlighting what matters to you -- if the shows are prestigious, such as International Salon of Contemporary Masterpieces, then put them in bold at the beginning of the phrase. If the venues are more impressive, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, put that first. I like to separate information by bullet points, so that an entry under the heading of Shows may look like the following:

International Salon of Contemporary Masterpieces • Dayton Museum of Art • Someplace, WY • 2010
My Thoughts (Solo Show) • Art of Excellence Gallery • Someplace, OR • 2010
Auction of the West's Best  (23rd Annual) • New and Old Gallery • Someplace, WA • 2009

In list form, whatever is first and highlighted will jump out to the person quickly skimming over the surface.

As a sidenote, maintain consistencey by formatting all of the lines within a heading the same way. If the first line in your Shows heading lists show first, then venue, city, and date, make sure that all of the lines in that heading are ordered the same. In the next, separate heading, say Awards, you may re-arrange the order, again, as long as all of the lines within that heading are consistent.

Also, regardless of what you were told in Mrs. McClintick's business course, there is no set order in which to put your headings, and again, if something makes you look less than sterling, then there is no reason to put it in -- for example, if you have no formal training, you may elect to leave out the Education heading altogether, or within the heading, describe yourself as self-taught, auto didactic, or something of a similar nature. Remember that seminars and classes qualify as education.

Whatever is your strong point, lead with this, following with headings of subsequent strength. Your goal is to present yourself as positively, accurately, and clearly as possible, so that a person wading through a pile of papers will stop and look at yours.

Here's an example: let's say that you have divided your resume into four headings: Select Shows, Awards, Representation, and Education. If your show schedule is anaemic but your education is shockingly impressive, then put Education at the top and Shows at the bottom.

Resumes, like life, are fluid things, and there is a reason why we print them on paper or send them digitally as opposed to carving them in granite: things change. Many of us, when we're first starting out, find ourselves scrabbling to find something, anything, about us or our experience that an employer would be interested in. The 16-year-old first launching into the work world lists the 4-H Livestock Show, the babysitting, and the steady paper route. The 44-year-old recently let-go middle manager does not.

An important caveat about making yourself look good: make sure that everything you list about yourself is accurate. If you taught classes in oil painting to some friends and neighbors, then you can accurately list yourself as a Private Instructor, not, however, as a Professor of Art. If you are asked about a detail in your resume and you cannot describe it without stuttering and stumbling from guilt, then leave it out or rephrase it so that you can acknowledge and justify it.

Finally, in your efforts to describe yourself, feel free to go beyond the ordinary. I had a client once applying for a management position who asked me, "Do you think that I should mention that I speak and write fluent Swedish?" While Swedish is not a language generally bandied about in small-town America, it is decidedly unusual enough to attract notice, and we set up an Additional Information heading at the bottom of the resume to list some of this person's  less conventional attributes and skills.

All of us have our quirks, and it is sometimes to our advantage to draw attention to them.

Next week: Odds and Ends.

Cascade Head -- Original Oil Painting by Steve Henderson of Steve Henderson Fine Art

Writing a resume doesn't have to be a moanfully dreadful task, but it will take work and thought. Regardless of whether you are writing it for a specifically art-related event or for a job in general, the resume's central purpose is to tell a lot about you in a minimum of space.

People reviewing the resumes generally have a stack of them to wade through -- think English teachers over the weekend with student essays on What I Did This Summer -- and you want to make sure that yours doesn't get overlooked or set to the side because it is unattractive or difficult to read.

First and foremost, make sure that your name and contact information are prominently displayed on each page, generally at the top. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? It is amazing what people leave off, especially on the second page (if you are running more than a second page, then you are either an academic presenting a Curriculum Vitae, not a resume, or you are being remarkably long-winded -- surely you can shorten the story and get to the punchline).

On resumes I prepare, I like to head the page with the person's name in a larger size -- around 18-24 points depending on the font -- large enough so that it stands out, but not so grand that it shouts. This is the place to put titles or descriptions as well -- Steve Henderson -- Fine Artist, or Steve Henderson -- ASMA Signature Member -- anything pertinent that draws the eye and defines who and what you are.

As a personal preference, I generally place a line under the name, and below that line list as much and as varied of contact information that I can supply -- some people contact exclusively by e-mail; others prefer phone; still others write; if I have no way of knowing the preferences of the selection committee, I give them everything I have.

An important caveat: when you list phone numbers, make sure that A) you have some form of answering service in case you are unable to take the call and B) no child or inarticulate grunting person will be answering that phone. With e-mail, get a new address specific to professionalism if your existing one sounds puerile or tacky, i.e., [email protected].

Regarding what font you use, start by taking a deep breath before you peruse the options at your disposal. Always keeping  in mind that a good resume presents a lot of information in a minimum of space and is easy to read and understand, skip over the Olde English Script, beautiful as it is, and give the chiseled Egyptian hieroglyphics a toss.

Choose a maximum of two fonts: one for headings and titles, the other for text. It's fine to get by with one, differentiating your headings and titles from the text by putting the former in bold and a larger type, but if you do opt for two distinct fonts, make sure that they are reasonably different; I like a sans serif like Arial or Franklin Gothic for my headers, and Times New Roman is my perennial favorite for text. More than two fonts starts to be too many ingredients for potato soup; it's possible, but it can be vaguely irritating to the reader.

And remember this: there is no Resume Police, and you are no longer writing essays for Mrs. Polansky, your uptight, anal English teacher (why are they always English teachers?) who marked you down if your margin spaces weren't just so and if you used that horrible phrase, "the fact that . . ."

Your purpose in writing the resume is not to get an A out of Mrs. Polansky's class but to stand out in the stack -- so rules are soft, but the primary unbreakable one is to make sure that everything you do contributes to your resume being easy to read and understand. If you can, say, creatively and clearly incorporate a number of fonts, by all means do so, but the difference they make in clarity and efficiency is probably minimal at best. You can spend your time more wisely by finessing what you actually say -- your skills, background, experience, strengths, and abilities. 

Next week -- Part II -- What to Put in Your Resume