1. Sending your letter to wrong person, location, or department.

Do you really want your letter to land you a job at company you're sending it to? Then take time to verify that you have proper name, title and address for hiring manager or other decision maker who should receive it.

Unless you're absolutely sure you already have most up- to-date contact information, take a few minutes to call and ask. Otherwise you may as well not bother sending your letter - it most likely won't reach intended recipient. And if it does, he or she won't be impressed that you didn't bother to take this simple step.

2. Irritating your potential employer with a pushy, arrogant or conceited tone to your letter.

Are you truly God's gift to humanity? If not, chances are you ought to come across with a bit of humility, not braggadocio. Save "I am too good for you not to hire me" stuff for when you're bragging to your friends about great job you just landed. (Even they probably won't be impressed - and they already like you!) Instead, let your accomplishments and skills speak for themselves.

3. Typos, misspellings, punctuation or grammatical errors.

There's no excuse for leaving any of these mistakes in a cover letter (or a resume for that matter). If such matters truly aren't your strong suite, ask a friend to look your letter over for you. Blatant errors like these are just one more reason for a hiring manager to shunt your resume and cover letter aside, never to be seen again. Why? Because they'll think you are too lazy, too uncaring or too unskilled to be a good fit at their company.

* Use strong, action oriented language that describes specific skills or accomplishments.

Go through your resume from top to bottom and eliminate weak language. Don't write "Was in charge of large graphic design department that increased company revenues" when you can say "Managed 12 graphic artists in major creative projects that increased revenues by over 3 million last year."

Whenever possible, eliminate all forms of verb "to be" (is, are, was, am and so on), as demonstrated in previous example. Instead, replace them with strong action words that paint a compelling picture.

* Add bullets.

Bullets are a great way to transform lists that would otherwise make tedious reading in paragraph form, or that would benefit by a cleaner layout. They make job of reading your resume more pleasant for reader. A perfect candidate for bullets is a list of accomplishments related to a single job. For example, "Postmaster, 1998 -2003" followed by 3 or 4 major accomplishments in bullet form.

* Write a specific, concise job description.