Presentation of your work

Presentation of your work, (is often) presentation of you: I wrote in blog some time ago about sending your CV to people. If you are sending information to someone for an audition for instance, do not send a document call ‘CV.doc’ or ‘Swanlakeaudition.doc’ The person receiving it is getting hundreds of CVs and if they are call ‘CV.doc’ it is really annoying because if they need to check something or contact you or something they have to open  each one them to find one they want at best, and at worst one  ‘cv.doc’ replaces another ‘cv.doc’  because it is the same the name and then your CV maybe lost altogether. Call it “yournameCV.doc” then it is easy to find for the person receiving it.

Likewise when sending in your work, maybe as a draft for feedback, call it “yournamexxxxx.doc” Otherwise if it gets separated from the email you sent it in it is really hard to find who wrote it.

Also ALWAYS page number everything – I like to use 1 of 6, 2 of 6 option because then if it printed and a page is missing the person reading it can see they have mislaid a page. Put the page number in the footer along with YOUR NAME, ID NUMBER (IN THIS CASE YOU STUDENT NUMBER), and the date.

This is about thinking about the person receiving what you sent and acknowledging you are not the only person in the world in contact with them. This is a professional way to behave I think.

Another tip is: if you are sending something to someone right at a deadline or after the deadline do not asked for feedback “as soon as possible” because you were so late sending it in! For instance some grant applications allow you to send in a draft to receive feedback before you send in the application. This is always a good idea for one thing you get to see what angle they are looking for from the feedback they give and it also means your idea maybe to talked about so people are already thinking about it. But if you, then, give the person ‘helping you’ an instruction Like “please get back to me as soon as possible so I can work on this”, it feels as if you are giving them another job to do. It can mean that the person feels they are being taken advantage of rather than extending a helping hand to you. The deadline was probably in place for THEM, so that they could mange the work NOT as a deadline for YOU.

Hope this helps!!