Resume is a verb that refers to what is done when the development of something that, for some reason, was interrupted is continued, followed or renewed . For example: “The judge blew his whistle to resume the meeting,” “We are going to resume this conference after lunch, thank you very much for joining us,” “When is the broadcast going to resume?” I want to continue listening to the concert!” .
For something to resume, therefore, it must have stopped . Take the case of a football match. A game lasts 90 minutes, although there are multiple interruptions. The game can be interrupted by a foul or when the ball goes out of bounds: for it to be resumed, the referee and the players must take some action. The game is also interrupted when the first half ends and resumes at the beginning of the second half.
Suppose that, at a conference , a speaker is speaking when, from the audience, someone interrupts him with a question. The speaker may decide to respond to this concern and only then prepare to resume his speech. This means that the dissertation in question can be “separated” into two blocks: one that develops until the question that marked the interruption and another that begins afterwards, when the person manages to resume his speech.
About resuming an action
While in some cases interruptions and subsequent resumptions are normal (as in the aforementioned example of the soccer match), in others they constitute exceptional issues . When a viewer is in a movie theater, they expect to be able to watch a movie without any cuts. If the electrical service is interrupted and the projection must be suspended until it is later resumed, it will be something extraordinary.
From the examples presented so far it can be deduced that the events or actions that can be started and resumed usually have a considerable duration: although it is true that it is also possible to interrupt someone while they are saying just one sentence, in such a case it would be said that, after the interruption, the person would try to "complete" his sentence, instead of resuming it. Having said this, we can think of other contexts in which the term resume has validity, such as being a project .
The term in the business field
Hardware development companies , for example, usually dedicate several years to research before starting the manufacturing stage, and to do so they go through various intermediate processes, many of which can be unexpected and lead, for example, to an indefinite interruption . Given that it is normal to hire other companies to require their services in various fields, which may also suffer unforeseen events and request more time than initially stipulated, it is virtually impossible to know what the workflow will be like.
The average consumer does not closely follow the behind-the-scenes of the creation of their favorite products, but rather learns about them through advertising campaigns or stumbles upon them in stores and simply purchases them. However, it is known that many of the most successful items on the market have gone through turbulent development processes , which have had to be cut and restarted more than once until they found the right path to reach their end.
Resume or restart
It is important to note that the term restart is often used as a synonym for restart, especially in the press, even if it is an error: restart means "start over" , while resume refers to " starting a process again". from the point at which it stopped .
There are many examples of headlines in which it is mentioned that "a match was restarted after an interruption" or that "a tennis match was restarted after the rain" , when in fact the appropriate verb would be resume.