exhaustudy

I’ve been working on being more conscious of how I write emails, and made this handy printable guide! I have a bad habit of overusing exclamation points, emojis, and qualifiers like “just” and “possibly” to sound extra-friendly and non-threatening in emails. (“Just wondering / just confirming / just checking / just making sure / just wanted to let you know”)
You are allowed to take up space. Your voice deserves to be heard. Your opinions matter. You don’t need to apologize for existing or asking for what you need. You are not “bossy” or “bitchy” for not sounding like a pep-machine 24/7.
If you act like a doormat, you better develop a taste for shoe leather. You have power too. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself— no one else is gonna do it for you. 💕 Support my art, join our awesome Discord community, and get exclusive access to new comics before anyone else: www.patreon.com/danidonovan

Is your protagonist manipulative? Well that’s awful… until they manipulate the antagonist into making a decision that saves the lives of their friends. 

Is your protagonist a skeptic? Well that’s not good… until someone tries to lie to them. 

Is your protagonist overprotective? That sucks… until someone they love is in danger. 

Your protagonist is honest? That’s good… until their survival depends on them being able to lie convincingly.

Your protagonist is brave? That’s good… until they foolishly run headlong into danger without a thought for the consequences.

Your protagonist is forgiving and able to see good in everyone? That’s good… until they continually forgive someone who doesn’t deserve it, and get taken advantage of because they can’t fathom that some people just suck.

Your protagonist is funny? That’s good… until they piss off everyone around them because they don’t seem to be taking the situation seriously, and they keep avoiding dealing with their problems by hiding behind humor.

Quick Tips for Learning Languages on Your Own

Here are some mindsets and techniques that helped me study Italian on my own after classes ended. Hope this helps :)

Also, I’m trying out a new format for shorter posts–let me know what you think!

Text format below.

‘You must include a cover letter’ does not mean ‘write a single line about why you want this position’. If you can’t be bothered to write at least one actual paragraphs about why you want this job, I can’t be bothered to read your CV.

Don’t bother including a list of your interests if all you can think of is ‘socialising with friends’ and ‘listening to music’. Everyone likes those things. Unless you can explain why the stuff you do enriches you as a person and a candidate (e.g. playing an instrument or a sport shows dedication and discipline) then I honestly don’t care how you spend your time. I won’t be looking at your CV thinking ‘huh, they haven’t included their interests, they must have none’, I’m just looking for what you have included.

Even if you apply online, I can see the filename you used for your CV. Filenames that don’t include YOUR name are annoying. Filenames like ‘CV - media’ tell me that you’ve got several CVs you send off depending on the kind of job advertised and that you probably didn’t tailor it for this position. ‘[Full name] CV’ is best.

USE. A. PDF. All the meta information, including how long you worked on it, when you created it, times, etc, is right there in a Word doc. PDFs are far more professional looking and clean and mean that I can’t make any (unconscious or not) decisions about you based on information about the file.

I don’t care what the duties in your previous unrelated jobs were unless you can tell me why they’re useful to this job. If you worked in a shop, and you’re applying for an office job which involves talking to lots of people, don’t give me a list of stuff you did, write a sentence about how much you enjoyed working in a team to help everyone you interacted with and did your best to make them leave the shop with a smile. I want to know what makes you happy in a job, because I want you to be happy within the job I’m advertising.

Does the application pack say who you’ll be reporting to? Can you find their name on the company website? Address your application to them. It’s super easy and shows that you give enough of a shit to google something. 95% of people don’t do this.

Tell me who you are. Tell me what makes you want to get up in the morning and go to work and feel fulfilled. Tell me what you’re looking for, not just what you think I’m looking for.

I will skim your CV. If you have a bunch of bullet points, make every one of them count. Make the first one the best one. If it’s not interesting to you, it’s probably not interesting to me. I’m overworked and tired. Make my job easy.

“I work well in a team or individually” okay cool, you and everyone else. If the job means you’ll be part of a big team, talk about how much you love teamwork and how collaborating with people is the best way to solve problems. If the job requires lots of independence, talk about how you are great at taking direction and running with it, and how you have the confidence to follow your own ideas and seek out the insight of others when necessary. I am profoundly uninterested in cookie-cutter statements. I want to know how you actually work, not how a teacher once told you you should work.

For an entry-level role, tell me how you’re looking forward to growing and developing and learning as much as you can. I will hire genuine enthusiasm and drive over cherry-picked skills any day. You can teach someone to use Excel, but you can’t teach someone to give a shit. It makes a real difference.

This is my advice for small, independent orgs like charities, etc. We usually don’t go through agencies, and the person reading through the applications is usually the person who will manage you, so it helps if you can give them a real sense of who you are and how you’ll grab hold of that entry level position and give it all you’ve got. This stuff might not apply to big companies with actual HR departments - it’s up to you to figure out the culture and what they’re looking for and mirror it. Do they use buzzwords? Use the same buzzwords! Do they write in a friendly, informal way? Do the same! And remember, 95% of job hunting (beyond who you know and flat-out nepotism, ugh) is luck. If you keep getting rejected, it’s not because you suck. You might just need a different approach, or it might just take the right pair of eyes landing on your CV.

And if you get rejected, it’s worthwhile asking why. You’ve already been rejected, the worst has already happened, there’s really nothing bad that can come out of you asking them for some constructive feedback (politely, informally, “if it isn’t too much trouble”). Pretty much all of us have been hopeless jobseekers at one point or another. We know it’s shitty and hard and soul-crushing. Friendliness goes a long way. Even if it’s just one line like “your cover letter wasn’t inspiring" at least you know where to start.

last semester i was very scared about the essays i had to write. in spanish, after the first two semesters, all exams are more or less essays you have to write during semester break. i had never written an essay before, at least not at university and let me tell you: the first one was a mess. i had no guidance. nobody told me how the f*ck i should write an essay. it took me so long to finish, i had no structure, my citations were messed up, but it was also a learning process. i pulled through and the marks weren’t that bad. now i’m writing my fourth essay and i must say, it get’s so much easier after the first one. so here are some tips for your first essay or maybe even for people who have already written some university stuff.

the first step is always finding a topic. i would suggest a little research. go find some books in your library or even google scholar will do it (honestly, due to covid-19 i write all my essays with internet resources and it’s working perfectly fine!). 

google scholar even gives you citations (be careful though! always check twice) and shows articles related to that topics so you can build a strong bibliography.

read some general articles about the topic and find something that interests you. i love using notion for this step. they even have a thesis-template i adjust to my needs and use. i can copy the link to the source, write down author, year, title and form of publication and have everything in one place to quickly find it. 

i even use it for a small timetable.

now do a more focused research and narrow it down. at my first attempts i made the error to choose a wide and very unspecific topic. therefore it was quite difficult to write everything important on only 15 pages. so try to choose a small topic and put enough research into it to write your requested pages. after finding a topic try to phrase a hypothesis. ask yourself a question you want to answer after writing this essay. think about possible answers (this first hypothesis doesn’t have to be right! you will certainly find the answer while writing). a big tip is also talking with your prof! present them your research so far and talk about the question you want to answer in your text. they are going to tell you, if this sounds good to them or if you messed up. doing this at the beginning is so much easier than afterwards, i promise.

before you start writing you should organise your thoughts and resources. thanks to @honig-prinzessin​, who introduced me to citavi, i can now organise my citations in one programm. 

for most university students this should be free, just look it up at the website of your uni. i don’t want to go into too much detail but you can create an overview of the topics you want to talk about and arrange all relevant citations below that. i find this system very easy to use! 

what i like to do afterwards is organising my thoughts and arguments. i write a small plan of what i want to talk about exactly at what point in my essay. i used to simply start writing but this resulted in a big mess- in my head and on paper. 

citavi even has a word extension so you just have to click to transfer your citations plus bibliography into word. really useful!

now start writing(oh it sounds so simple…). it doesn’t matter how bad the first draft is, just get it out of your head. make sure you use all guidelines your uni has for essays: font, size, layout, how to quote, etc.

when you finished the essay ask someone to read over it. get a second opinion. check again if you did your quotations right (don’t want to get accused of plagiarism!). and then just send it off. honestly, i hate editing the most. i don’t want to read my bad wording. and be proud of yoursef! 

Also, when should one put a semicolon? How often should semicolons be used?

Thank you in advance!

WHO vs WHOM

You should use ‘whoM’ in a sentence when you expect the answer to contain the words ‘HIM’ or ‘THEM’ or ‘HER’. 

Question: WHOM did you invite?

Answer: I invited HIM.

It would be incorrect to answer ‘I invited HE’, so we would use WHOM in this case.

This is simplistic, and the easiest way to explain it, but if you want to know the WHY behind it, grammatically, it’s because WHO is a replacement for the SUBJECT ‘pronoun’ (he, or she, or they), the word that’s doing the action.

Meanwhile, WHOM is a replacement word for the DIRECT OBJECT pronoun (him, her, us, them), the word that’s receiving the action. 

If you’re still confused about whether to use ‘who’ or ‘whom’ in the sentence, pick a pronoun (”he” is easiest) and try replacing it with that word.

If ‘he’ sounds more correct, use WHO.

If ‘him’ sounds more correct, use WHOM.

...

SEMICOLONS

Semicolons are not colons. They look like a comma, but they are not that either.

What semicolons are - fancy periods. 

That’s how I describe it, and you can fight me.

The reason they are fancy periods is because semicolons link two full sentences - or two clauses which COULD be full sentences, but for whatever reason decided to get married. 

You should be using a semicolon in places where you COULD end a sentence with a period, but you don’t want to. You want two sentences together - because they’re continuing the idea, or expanding on something. 

They’re also used for some forms of lists, but I’m assuming that’s not really what you were asking about.

When NOT to use a semicolon - anytime when you have incomplete clauses. 

“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”

She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”

She explained that basically it wasn’t the ending that was the most suspenseful or exciting part, but how you got there. This is why The Iliad spoils its own ending in the opening lines. This is why we have so many different retellings of Shakespeare, of Arthurian legends, of fairy tales. 

helpful links:

the one productivity system you need: time vs energy management

eisenhower matrix

similiar way to prioritize tasks