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I had managed to keep myself occupied by picking the icing sugar off the sweating danishes at the breakfast buffet, when a voice bluntly burst my bubble: “You planning to ruin all the food out here?”

I turned to find the bride’s uncle standing right behind me. He was a short, bookish man who drew a striking resemblance to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote. As I steadied myself with two fingers on the table’s edge he looked at me as if to assess my very existence. That’s when I knew I was about to be interviewed by a patriarch of the family and there was no escape.

I began explaining my affiliation with the bride and soon found myself on the topic of employment. He worked on Parliament Hill and made sure to reference more acronyms than I could keep track of. I stared at his checkered bowtie as he continued to talk over my head for a solid ten minutes. Just as I began to plan my exit strategy he made a rather general remark about us Gen-Ys that I just could not walk away from.

Referring to us as “youngins,” he explained that our generation will always have difficulty finding employment unless we learn to inject some personality into our resumes. Our lack of individuality, particularly when it came to vocabulary is, in his opinion, our greatest downfall. Naturally, my gut reaction was outrage and I insisted he provide me an example.

Little did I know he had spent the last two weeks sifting through internship applications, which left a dozen fresh examples on the tip of his tongue. He cleared his throat and began listing some of his favorites: “passionate, self-motivated, task-oriented, forward-thinking.” In the diplomatic world he works in everyday, these terms have become the equivalent to LOL in the mobile world. They are used so frequently that they have lost their meaning and more often than not, send an applicant’s resume into the rejection pile without a second thought.

Looking back on that enlightening conversation with Uncle Capote, it occurred to me that I too was guilty of defaulting to these resume buzz-words. I suppose they seemed professional at the time, or just transferred nicely as I updated my resume year after year. But now that I am finished school with similar degrees and work experience as every other qualified applicant in my field, the old buffet of five dollar words seemed a bit juvenile.

So how could my resume stand out without making me sound like the boss from Office Space? The answer was simple. Write the way I would speak in an interview, or how I would explain myself to a strange uncle the morning after a friend’s wedding. Be straight, professional and to the point. By cutting out the jargon, it becomes easy to stand out from all the other resumes that are busy adding to the homogenized hum.