Tense, Person, and Punctuation: Resume Grammar Rules

Resumes follow their own small set of grammar conventions: past tense for finished work, present tense for your current role, no “I,” no articles at the start of bullets, and either periods on every bullet or periods on none. The rules themselves are less important than applying them the same way on every line. Inconsistency is what a careful reader notices, and it reads as carelessness even when the content is strong.

Tense: past for done, present for doing

Every finished role is past tense throughout. Built, managed, wrote, reduced. This includes your most recent job if you’ve left it.

Your current role mixes both, and that’s correct. Ongoing responsibilities take present tense; completed projects inside that role take past tense.

• “Manage the weekly production schedule for two shifts.” (Still true.)
• “Rebuilt the intake form in the spring, cutting the follow-up emails the team sends.” (Finished.)

That mix looks inconsistent at a glance and isn’t. What matters is consistency within each bullet — don’t let one sentence slide between tenses.

Never use future tense. “Will be responsible for” has no place on a resume, including for a job you’ve accepted but not started. If you’re between roles, describe what you did in the last one.

No present continuous. “Managing the vendor relationships” is not the convention; “Manage the vendor relationships” is. The gerund form creeps in when people write bullets as fragments of a sentence that began with “Responsible for” — cut the opener and fix the verb.

Person: no “I,” no “my,” no “we”

Resumes are written in an implied first person. The subject is understood to be you, so you leave it out.

• Not: “I rewrote the onboarding checklist.”
• Yes: “Rewrote the onboarding checklist.”

This applies to your summary too, which describes what you are rather than stating “I am.” How to write a resume summary that earns its space shows the shape.

Avoid third person entirely — “Dana rewrote the onboarding checklist” reads like a biography, not a resume. And avoid “we,” which obscures your contribution. If the work was collaborative, name your role explicitly rather than hiding behind the plural: “One of three writers on the style guide, responsible for the accessibility chapter.”

The one place “I” is normal: a cover letter, which is a letter and follows letter conventions.

Articles: drop the leading ones

Resume bullets conventionally drop “a,” “an,” and “the” where doing so doesn’t hurt clarity:

• Wordier: “Managed the relationships with the top five vendors.”
• Tighter: “Managed relationships with the top five vendors.”

Note the second “the” stayed, because “top five vendors” needs it to read naturally. The rule is a tendency toward compression, not an instruction to strip every article — bullets that read like telegrams (“Managed vendor relationship top five”) have gone too far.

Punctuation: pick a system and hold it

Bullet-ending periods: all or none. Both conventions are accepted. Periods on every bullet is slightly more formal and reads well when bullets are full clauses. No periods anywhere is cleaner when bullets are short fragments. What is never acceptable is periods on six bullets and not on the other five, which is the most common punctuation error on resumes.

Semicolons inside bullets are usually a sign of two bullets. If you’re joining two independent thoughts, split them.

Commas in numbers, consistently. “1,200” not “1200,” and don’t switch between styles.

Em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens. Use an en dash for date ranges (“2022–2025”) and be consistent about whether you put spaces around it. Use hyphens for compound modifiers: “cross-functional,” “client-facing,” “full-time.”

Ampersands. Fine in section headings (“Certifications & Licenses”) and in company names that use them. In body text, write “and.”

Serial commas. Pick a side and stay there. In a skills list, the pattern matters more than the choice.

Quotation marks and exclamation points. Neither belongs on a resume. An exclamation point in particular reads as unprofessional even when the enthusiasm is genuine.

Capitalization

Job titles: capitalize them when they’re your actual title in an entry heading (“Operations Coordinator”), lowercase when used generically in a sentence (“worked alongside three operations coordinators”).

Section headings: consistent style throughout. All of them “Experience,” “Skills,” “Education” — not “Experience” and “SKILLS.”

Don’t capitalize job functions for emphasis. “Managed Customer Onboarding and Vendor Relations” mid-bullet is a tic borrowed from job postings.

Do get product and technology names right. “JavaScript” not “Javascript,” “QuickBooks” not “Quickbooks,” “PowerPoint” not “Powerpoint.” Getting these wrong in a skills section is a small, specific signal about attention to detail, in exactly the section where a knowledgeable reader is looking closely. Build a skills section worth reading covers the rest of that section’s conventions.

Numbers

Spell out numbers one through nine and use figures for 10 and up — that’s the general convention, and resumes bend it freely because figures scan faster. The workable compromise: use figures whenever the number is doing real work (“Trained 9 new hires,” “4 states”), spell out when it’s incidental. Then be consistent.

Always use figures for dates, percentages, money, and measurements. And keep every figure honest — see how to quantify achievements without inventing numbers for what to do when you don’t have one.

Abbreviations and acronyms

Spell out an acronym on first use with the short form in parentheses, then use the short form. This helps a human who doesn’t know the term and it puts both forms in the text where searchable. Skip it for acronyms so common in your field that spelling them out looks odd.

Never invent an abbreviation. If your employer’s internal shorthand isn’t public, translate it.

The consistency pass

Grammar errors on a resume rarely come from not knowing the rules. They come from editing the document forty times across two years, in three different moods, without ever reading it straight through. So read it straight through, looking only for pattern breaks:

1. Scan the last character of every bullet. All periods or no periods.
2. Scan the first word of every bullet. All verbs, correct tense, no repeats clustered together.
3. Scan every date range. One format, one dash style.
4. Scan every section heading. One capitalization style.
5. Scan for “I,” “my,” and “we.” Delete or rewrite.

Five passes, five minutes, and each one looks for exactly one thing — which is why it works. Doing this as part of the broader review in proofread your resume like an editor catches the rest.