Attached to every résumé is an obligatory cover letter, which seems to have a difficulty rating of 11, since that’s where we find the most tortured prose ever set to paper. For example:

I expect the position to pay commissary to that of its value, as well as to the performance completed.

It is my desire to develop and generate the revolving scheme to filter to the consuming public in.

Below you’ll find dozens of examples gleaned from these efforts, to amaze and horrify you. It’s an ever-changing gallery of mangled syntax, misbegotten diction, and unedited effluvia. Here in the post-literate era, new specimens arrive often.

But first, why are cover letters so often awful? We see two huge reasons:

And yes, there are 500 applicants. Okay, maybe not for that coveted hostess position at The Olive Garden, but statistically, it’s harder to get a job at Killian Branding than at Southwest Airlines, which is, in turn, arithmetically harder to get into than Harvard.

Applicants often write to an abstract “Sir/Madam,” instead of to an easily-researched human being who has just disposed of 12 other résumés that morning. They might spin their wheels with the non-starting “My name is ______,” which provokes us to ask “Are you highlighting your name to impress us with your celebrity status?” Or the pointless “attached is my résumé” which is a big Duh. Worse is Mail Merge Slippage, where a name, or company name, auto-inserted into the text by some Microsoft Resume-O-Matic fails to match the name of the recipient.

Nobody proofreads. Three-fourths of all cover letters sport at least one spelling error. Most are puzzled by punctuation. No small number are festooned with what we call the Shoot-Me-Now Errors (there/their/they’re; its/it’s; to/two/too). Enjoy your career at The Olive Garden.

A word to the wise: An error-free letter is now so freakin’ rare that the minimal care required to send a letter with zero defects, combined with a few crisply written simple declarative sentences, will, alone, guarantee a respectful reading of a résumé. Maybe even secure an interview.

Doesn’t anybody read Strunk and White in school? If you haven’t, get a copy of The Elements of Style, so you can follow it all your days, especially Chapter 5.