Captions
If you have a one-address caption, you may either center it or put it to the far left margin. In the centered caption, be careful with your city and state, however. If your city and state have a large number of characters, you should abbreviate the state to the two-letter postal abbreviation.The city and state line takes up so much room, the caption doesn't look good.
The trick for centered captions is to make the length of each line match the others as closely as possible.
Caption Creativity
The centered or left-margin formats above for the caption are not chiseled in stone. There is room for creativity. But watch out. Be creative if you truly have skill in the graphic arts. Otherwise, you'll end up producing something that'll only hurt your chances for an interview. Here's a sample of a different caption that saved considerable vertical space for a writer who wanted a one-page resume: Headings
Formatting the headings will determine the overall appearance and perhaps even the length of your resume. Two basic possibilities exist: left-margin headings and centered headings.
Centered Headings
A Word of Caution. You might think the centered-heading format allows you to get more information on your resume. This is probably true if you have a great deal of text and relatively few headings. But if you have quite a few headings, the centered-heading format actually will reduce the amount of space available for text. The heading in a centered-heading format takes up three lines: one above the heading, one for the heading, and one below the heading. Thus, if you have a resume with six headings, the centered-heading format eats up eighteen lines just for the headings alone. And if your headings consume that much vertical space, you won't have much room left over for your heads, entries, subheadings, and dates.
Furthermore, unless you have a lot of text and relatively few headings, the centered-heading format doesn't look very good. This is especially evident when you keep in mind that the lines in each entry will be of varying length. The headings will tend to get lost. The overall visual effect will be out of balance, due primarily to the small amount of text and the vary ing length of the lines in each entry. Thus, unless you have lots of text and relatively few headings, you should probably use the left-margin format.
Left-Margin Headings: The Margin for Entries
In the left-margin heading format the headings appear at the far left margin. The entries then should appear in the next established margin. They should not have a varying margin depending on the length of the heading.
Instead, all entries should appear flush to the margin that you determine-one margin, not multiple margins. So if you adopt the left-margin heading format, be very careful about deter mining the left margin for your entries. Many people make terrible mistakes by letting the length of headings determine the margin for entries. Let's use a ridiculous example to illustrate the point.
That format leans too far to the right. The problem arose because the margin was determined by the length of a heading rather than by considerations of graphic art. The heading should not set the margin, you should.
Dealing with Long Headings
If you have a long heading, there are three simple cures: (1) rename the heading; (2) stack the heading; or (3) leave the heading on a line by itself. In the second example, notice that you begin the entry on the first line of the multiline heading. Do not put the first entry line on the last line of the multiline heading; otherwise, you'll have uneven amounts of space between stacked and unstacked headings on your resume.
Consistent Appearance of Entries
Multiple margins and indentations present similar problems in resume entries. As you format your entries, keep in mind that a margin or indentation tends to attract the reader's eye. If too many margins and too many indentations try to attract the reader's eye, you'll end up with the mess we saw earlier.
The trick in repairing that resume entry is to write and format it the way all other written information is prepared: in neat; crisp paragraphs or lists. By writing the way we ordinarily write and playing a few graphical tricks of emphasis. That looks like what most people are accustomed to reading: paragraphs. To achieve this look, remember three rules: (1) don't let the length of words determine margins or indentations; (2) don't have more than two or three indentations in the entire resume; and (3) don't arbitrarily establish a margin without a good reason to do so.
The types of mistakes people make in formatting resume entries are fairly predictable. At the top of the list are multiple margins.
If you firmly believe multiple margins are needed to make things stand out, then try to use as few as possible. Be sure to follow the same formatting approach for all entries, and make certain you determine the margins. Don't let the fortuity of subheading length make those decisions.