“Managed a team,” “accomplished a task,” and “earned top honors” are all examples of past tense and implied action but aren’t passive. This helps your accomplishments boil down to simple, powerful statements. Past tense allows for an implication that you acted without having to actually throw in that pesky noun.
The past tense is often used to help keep resumes concise and active. First, try not to confuse past tense with passive voice. Periwinkle proud, there are a few things to keep in mind when identifying and utilizing the passive versus the active voice. General Guidance on Passive vs Activeīefore you bust out that red pen and turn your resume into a horror show that would make Ms. The reader’s attention is instantly drawn to the impressive accomplishment of being “awarded top prize” which puts a bigger grammatical impact on the achievement. “My designs were awarded the top prize for three years in a row.” “All departmental sales goals were exceeded during my tenure.”Īnother instance where the passive voice can be used in an expert manner is when the action itself should be the highlight of the sentence, such as in cases where your individual involvement is a given. In this case, the passive voice can come to the rescue, allowing you to promote the accomplishment without making it look like you’re taking all the credit. Take for example a situation in which there was large growth or big accomplishments but your individual contributions are either difficult to explain in a few sentences or were more attenuated. In some cases, however, this could prove a beneficial tactic. If you’re promoting your qualities as a manager or regaling readers with tales of your successes, downplaying your achievements can be detrimental to your job prospects. One of the problems with writing in the passive voice is that it removes the agency of the actor and focuses the reader’s attention on the action, instead. Now that we’ve hyped up the detriments to the passive voice, it’s time to make a quick addendum. Passive: Responsibility was recognized as one of my strengths.Active: After only one year, I earned a promotion to Supervisor.
ACTIVE VS PASSIVE VOICE ON RESUMES PLUS
Plus the phrasing added a whole bunch of unnecessary words that could potentially push you over that preferred one-page resume limit.įor additional practice, here are a few real world and employment search applicable examples of re-writing passive sentences to make them active. While “this was made by me” conveys the same information, you can see how the verb is now the active and focal point of the sentence. “I made this” is a simple example of the object taking an action. In technical terms, passive writing occurs when the object of the sentence is acted upon instead of doing the activity.
ACTIVE VS PASSIVE VOICE ON RESUMES HOW TO
So now that we’ve lead with the whole, passive is bad, active is good, it’s time to talk about how to eliminate the problem phrases from your resume or cover letter. With all that being said, it’s time to delve into passive voice 101 when it comes to scoring the job of your dreams. In general, however, writing passively can make sentences confusing, phrasing clunky and is overall frowned upon by savvy prospective employers.
In fact, there may be a time or two when the passive voice can help savvy resume writers (more on that later). Using the passive voice isn’t inherently awful. While you may have locked these memories away into the “lessons we’ll never use as adults” category (right alongside anything advanced algebra and anything other than the most rudimentary biology assignments) it turns out that identifying and eliminating the passive voice can make a big difference in your job-hunting prospects as an adult. We still have nightmares about red circles on our essay assignments to this day. Periwinkle preached on about the dangers of writing in the passive voice. It’s time to take a trip on the “way back when” time machine to that day in junior high where Ms.
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