One of the most common mistakes that I see when reviewing cover letters is that the applicant has strategically (and rather successfully) managed to comment on the 44 different experiences that they have had over the past 4-6 years. Don’t do this.

Try to avoid including too many examples in the body paragraphs of your cover letter. When many disparate examples or experiences are included, you run the risk of having a document that 1) mirrors the content on your resume, and 2) overwhelms your reader, thus diluting the value of the most relevant experiences that you’ve included.

I often recommend writing about 1-2 experiences that are directly related to the position of which you are applying to. If you write a fine paragraph about one experience, I’m much more likely to remember you in a stack of 100 applications.

Many applicants casually reference an experience that they’ve had without going into much detail within their body paragraphs. I recommend doing the opposite – tell me more about that one particular experience. In fact, tell me a story about a very specific time.

We’re natural storytellers and before reading and writing were commonplace, people relied heavily on the dissemination of information from others by word of mouth. You can tell someone that you’ve obtained those skills, but what you really ought to do in a letter is show the reader how and when you’ve actually used those skills. Let them get an understanding for themselves as to whether or not you’ve acquired the experience required for the particular position.

Your cover letter requires a bit of creativity in order to make it stand out among the letters of other applicants. I often place lines through sentences that sound like this: “Through my experience as a Third Shift Rodeo Clown, I obtained the skills necessary…” or “By virtue of my volunteer role as an Amateur Cartographer at the Museum of 18th Century Maps, I…” The reason that I cross these sentences out is because they have become cliché in the underground-cover-letter-review-world and seldom add value to your goal of obtaining that amazing job or internship. What I usually notice when reading these phrases is the following sentence; the statement after the cliché. Typically, this is where the writer “jumps” in to the details of the experience that they’ve had. That said, next time you find yourself starting your paragraph with one of the above phrases, place a line through it and jump right in.