How to Revise Resume Bullet Points Without Sounding Generic

Many student resumes contain bullets like responsible for data analysis or helped with marketing research. They are not terrible, but they read like a job description, not a trace of real work. The reader cannot tell what you touched, what changed, or how much responsibility you actually carried. Revision should start there, before any fancy verb appears.

A useful bullet often has four pieces: action, task, method, and evidence. Helped with survey analysis becomes Cleaned 300+ survey responses in Excel and summarized three recurring user concerns for the project lead. If you do not have a clean number, do not invent one. Scope can also come from a deliverable, a timeline, a tool, a stakeholder, or the part of the workflow you owned.

Chinese international students sometimes understate their work, then overcorrect in the revision. Assisted, participated in, and was involved in can make real work disappear. Led, transformed, and optimized can make a small task sound suspiciously inflated. Natural resume English sits between those extremes. It names the responsibility at the right strength: supported, coordinated, analyzed, drafted, tested, organized, or presented.