As a person who makes my living with words, I’m regularly asked to read people’s writing and give feedback. A business plan. A resume. Website copy. A grad school application essay. A profile for an online dating site.

I usually say some variation of yes to the request. But giving feedback is complex. Sometimes the person really wants me re-write the piece, not just give feedback, which makes me feel uncomfortable. People are also vulnerable when they ask for feedback. So I have learned to tread the line between honesty and brutality.

Writers aren’t the only ones who are asked to give this kind of feedback. Everyone gets to play editor from time to time. As friends look for jobs, they need help with resumes and cover letters; children ask for help with essays and papers; bosses and colleagues need to know if a speech or report is up to snuff.

When I’m asked to give feedback, I try to follow the following few ground rules. These guidelines have helped me to be honest yet mindful of people’s feelings. They have also set up some useful boundaries and to create the best environment for helping people.

1. All feedback should include something constructive. When I started teaching seminars for The OpEd Project, the advice I got for reviewing student work was to start with two positive pieces of feedback because people hear constructive/critical feedback better after positive engagement is established. This is probably because of the negativity bias, a psychological phenomenon which causes people to place more emphasis on negative experiences rather than positive ones. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

As a popular and controversial blogger on career management, Penelope Trunk (who formerly blogged for Yahoo! finance), knows how to get attention. She does it by giving contrarian advice (“why graduate school is outdated“), blogging about her marital problems and dating life, and by frequent references to sex (always with connection to a career issue),

This week, she’s hoping to shine the spotlight on Brazen Careerist, an online network she has co-founded, which she hopes will be GenY’s answer to LinkedIn.

People in different age groups network differently, says Trunk, and they need different tools to get jobs and manage their careers. As she sees it, Baby Boomers responded to ads in newspapers, Generation Jones (the tail end of the Baby Boom) used sites like Monster and Careerbuilder, and Generation X dominates LinkedIn. “We’re due for a new recruiting tool,” she explained. “And it has to deliver what Gen Y wants, which is conversations in a professional environment. They have been networking online since they used IM in the fifth grade to talk to the popular kids after school.” {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

Does it drive you nuts to have to check voicemail on more than one phone?

Have you ever started a call on a land line and then wanted to transfer the call to your cell phone so that you can finish from outside?

Ever call someone, leave a message with your office number, then leave your office and realize that forgot to give your cell number?

Would you like to be able to send text messages from your computer rather than from your cell phone?

Ever wish you could listen in on while someone was leaving a voicemail and then decide to pick up (like those old answering machines allowed) — or that you could read your voicemail as an email or text message rather than having to call into a system (like iPhone’s visual voicemail)?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ll probably want to try Google Voice, a new service that has “future of telephone” written all over it. It’s not a phone service provider, so you’ll still need your contract with whatever company provides your service. Rather it’s a new phone number that can coordinate your different phones and allow you to do a slew of things easily and efficiently. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days to see whether it’s something that will help or complicate life at work. (I’m not the only one on Shine playing around. Daily Grommet just did a post explaining how it works and how to get on the waiting list for a number.)

So what does Google Voice mean for your career? {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

A new book, “How Not to Act Old,” by Pamela Redmond Satran is climbing the ranks of the Amazon humor section. I’ve read it and like most humor, there’s a lot of truth behind its snarky advice and tips for middled aged folks who are starting to feel like they “just don’t get those young people.” Satran dissects and contrasts the habits of the old (basically, anyone over 40) with those of their children (or those young enough to be their children) decoding everything from the way different groups use technology (old people leave voicemails; young people assume people will see a missed call and return it), to the way they use language (old people smoke pot; young people call it weed); and even attitudes towards bikini waxing (fodder for a whole mini chapter).

As someone who has been working long enough to remember wearing pantyhose to my first two jobs as a lawyer (yes, I’m that old) and who now wonders whether I can get away with wearing leggings to a professional event, I appreciated Satran’s take on how not to act old at work.

I asked her for some customized tips for readers who want to appear a little younger in their use of technology in their careers. Here’s what she had to say: {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

We’ve all heard the stories of those whose imprudent online postings (usually involving some choice words about an employer or a poor choice of photos of themselves) cost them a job. In the past few weeks it happened to a New York City government staffer, who resigned after posting her views about the President (whom she dubbed “O-dumb-a”) and his handling of the brouhaha over the arrest of  Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

These are gaffes, and the people who made them should know better.

But lately I’ve been pondering the opposite situation. In this era of online engagement and revelation, can it ever be a problem to reveal too little or to have no online persona at all? {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

For a growing swath of the workforce the resume has been replaced, or at least supplemented, by the bio. If you’ve ever had to be introduced by someone at a conference, you know it’s wise to give the person introducing you a written bio rather than sit back and hear how she decides to describe you. Written bios are posted on websites; abbreviated bios show up on sites like LinkedIn; even shorter ones appear next to our profiles on Twitter; and snappy taglines trail the bottoms of our emails.

With the bio in full bloom right now, it pays to take some time to write yours in a way that that reflects how you want to be perceived. Perhaps you want to show a sense of humor or wit. Maybe you want to show your technical prowess by delivering your bio in a video format. And while you’re at it, why not let your bio accomplish some personal branding for you. As you write yours, consider a few things.

If you’re a writer, show off your writing

While writers should have an advantage in crafting well-written bios, it’s remarkable how few unleash their facility with language when profiling themselves. Which is why I love the bio and “about Laura” sections of novelist Laura Zigman’s website. They are composed entirely in the third person and the opening few lines of the bio give you an idea of her tone: “Laura Zigman grew up in Newton, Massachusetts (where she felt she never quite fit in), and graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (where she didn’t fit in either) and the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course (where she finally started to feel like she fit in).” {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

On Monday morning I met Deborah DiRago because we were both guests on the public radio show, “The Takeaway.”  We were there to talk about DiRago’s efforts to find a “job search buddy” — someone who would help her stay motivated and accountable in her job search.  DiRago has been unemployed since May, when her job in international event planning suddenly disappeared and her company announced it was shutting its doors.

After a while of navigating the job market on her own, DiRago decided that it would help if she found someone to meet with regularly to move along her job search. She says she is looking for the kind of person who’d hold her to task if she said she was going to make 5 career-related contacts in a given week.

So far, the job buddy search has been almost as challenging as the job search. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

A few years ago, video resumes got a bad name when aspiring investment banker Aleksey Vayner made the now infamous video showing off his many talents (including images of himself bench-pressing 495 pounds, karate-chopping a pile of bricks, and serving a tennis ball at 140mph). Vayner’s video went viral, but not in the way he wanted. Rather than causing a stir around his creative efforts to find a job, Vayner’s name became shorthand for “video resume disaster.”

But when video resumes are good, they can be very good. As is the case with “Hire Me,” a new video created by recent Bentley University graduate Alec Biedrzycki, which was released on Tuesday.

{Read the rest at Yahoo!}

For a long time, I had difficulty asking for help. I felt more comfortable on the giving side of things and feared that if I regularly asked others for help I’d take advantage of their kindness. Then I realized that most successful people know how and when to ask for help. And that most people are inclined to offer help when asked (research backs this up.)

So I started asking, and good things happened as a result of it. I got smart advice. I got support from others. And I probably made a lot of people feel good that I respected them enough to seek their counsel.

Every day I get at least one email or call asking for help with something — a request for an introduction, a recommendation, advice on how to find a job. Some of these requests are easy to answer, and in those cases, I respond quickly, either by doing the thing requested of me or explaining why I can’t. Others leave me frustrated with the questioner. And when I’m frustrated it’s usually for a variation of the same few reasons. The person didn’t ask a proper question; the person didn’t appear to have done any work to solve the problem on her own; or she was coming to me for something that I wasn’t really in a position to help with.

Based on these experiences, I’ve developed some guidelines for how I ask for help: {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

I spend every Sunday visiting my 94-year old grandmother. She is unusually healthy and independent for her age. But what strikes me most about her is that she is lacking in purpose. Little things take on big importance because not very much happens from day to day. And she is always looking back at the period in her life when she felt useful and productive. When she could do things and go places. This experience, coupled with the fact that I really enjoy my work, makes me think I will likely work until I can no longer work.

The interesting thing is that my grandmother doesn’t even understand what I do — a common issue for people who age and lose connection to the workforce. In fact, we had a running debate on whether “blog” was a real word since it wasn’t in her dictionary. Finally, she saw a reference on CNN to Larry King’s blog and then an article in her Readers Digest about blogs, and she conceded that I was not making up this work I claimed to do. Since my grandmother has never been on the Internet, I can understand why blogs don’t seem real. And thought it’s easy for me to say I’ll commit to staying current on the ways people work, I do wonder how hard that will be once yet to be envisioned tools are created by those generations younger than I. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}