An Error Free Resume - Ten Proofreading Tips

Your resume must be error free – free of any typos, grammar errors and misspellings. Even a winning resume is in danger of being put in the reject pile if hasn’t been proofread. Certainly a resume with errors makes the job candidate look less qualified and it gives an unfavorable first impression of the person. The best way to guard against these kinds of errors on your resume is to proofread it carefully. Here is a list of proofreading tips to help assure an error free resume

1. Read the copy out loud. (I do this with my door shut. Otherwise people begin to wonder!)

2. Read the copy backwards to focus on the spelling of words. Covering the words above and below your line helps you to keep your eye just on the line you are proofreading. You don’t have the context and meaning to let you know if your eye skips a line.

3. Use spell check and grammar check as a first screening but don’t rely on them. There are too many possibilities for error with spell check. (Examples: there and their, to and two, our and hour etc words that are correctly spelled but may not be the form you wanted.)

4. Have someone else read it. Ask a friend, a relative or your coach to review it for you. Your final review however is important because it is your resume!

5. Print it out and read it even if you have proofread it on your computer. Something can look entirely different on paper. It is easy to miss something on your computer. Some people suggest that one should never proofread on your computer.

6. Proof the body and the headlines separately. It is easy to miss something in a headline. We seem to concentrate more on the body.

7. Use a ruler to check the copy line by line. Keeping your eye on one line at a time is important.

8. Have a dictionary close by and a thesaurus too. When in doubt look it up if you can. It is always hard to find a misspelled word in the dictionary however!!

9. Don’t proof for every type of mistake at once – do one proof for spelling, another for missing/additional spaces, consistency of word usage, font size etc.

10. Take a break and come back to it fresh. How often do you find a typo after the fact even when you have proofread the document several times! The wrong spelling looks right until you leave it and come back to it when you are fresh.