The Importance of Proofreading your Resume
Your resume is important for applying to college, graduate school, and new jobs. Learn about these common resume mistakes.
The Resume Problem
Students applying to college, graduate school, new jobs, or research positions are doing everything they can to stand out. As a result, the competition amongst job seekers and college applicants is intense, and the number of applications is overwhelming. This is especially true for non-native English speakers and ESL job seekers.
Hiring managers and college admissions counselors are certainly not making it easy. According to a 2018 eye-tracking study, Ladders Inc determined that the average total time recruiters spend reading a resume is only…7.4 seconds!
So how exactly do you stand out amongst the competition?
Proofreading and Editing your Resume
So you have your job experience, education history, and interests listed. Everything is designed and looks organized. So you’re now ready to apply to college or that new job, right?
Maybe you’ve already added some eye-catching language to make your resume look more professional. But let’s not forget that one of the most important steps in producing any piece of quality writing is making sure it is error-free and polished. Of course, a flashy design or extra internship will be helpful, but hiring managers’ eyes won’t get far if they see a silly grammar or spelling mistake.
Be sure to familiarize yourself with the differences between proofreading and editing. For resume purposes, our content is ourselves, and our purpose is straightforward. We’ll be focusing mainly on proofreading mistakes.
Common Resume Mistakes
The first step to writing the best resume possible is to become aware of what common English writing mistakes are so you can find and correct them in your resume.
To answer this, the English editing service Wordvice recently conducted an analysis of resumes, articles, essays, and manuscripts written by over 9,000 writers and consisting of 12,000,000 words and found the following results:
- Among authors submitting college application essays or academic journal manuscripts, there was an average of 12.03 errors per 250 words.
- The most common error type was not grammar (21%) but style (32%).
Error frequencies according to type were as follows:
- Style: 3.8 errors/page
- Vocabulary Enhancement: 2.6 errors/page
- Grammar: 2.59 errors/page
- Contextual Spelling: 1.69 errors/page
- Punctuation: 1.1 errors/page
- Sentence Structure: 0.25 errors/page
A bit surprising?
You would think that something as important as your resume would be mostly error-free, but that is certainly not the case. The truth is that proofreading and editing your resume is the final and most important step. You must get out of your own way so your work and education history (and even clever design sense) can shine through to the college counselor or hiring manager.
How to Edit and Proofread your Resume
Let’s delve a bit deeper into the Wordvice Report, which is a really interesting resource. The three main parts you should focus on when you edit your resume are: Style, Grammar, and Spelling.
How to Correct Style Errors in your Resume
One might not think of style as a glaring issue when it comes to English writing mistakes. But let’s remember, we’re talking about your resume. Style is a huge component of resumes.
Wordvice found that 67% of all style-related mistakes can be attributed to passive voice.
Passive voice is a grammar structure that uses “to be + past participle” to show a subject receiving an action caused by something else. For example, “Projects were organized” instead of “organized a project” on your resume.
Wordiness is another common style error. It’s so easy to go overboard with resume keywords to fluff up your resume. But this is a major red flag to resume readers.
Unless you need to use a specific term, you should not repeat the same words or phrases within a few lines of each other. Don’t use things like “product management” and then say “Managed many projects from development to implementation”.
How to Correct Grammar Mistakes in your Resume
The overwhelming proportion (62%) of grammar-related mistakes found in the analysis was due to article use (A/An/The/This/That). This is understandable when your native language might not use words like “a”, “an”, and “the”. Article misuse often occurs when people are uncertain if a noun is countable or uncountable.
When talking about countable nouns generally, use the plural+NO article. If it is the first time mentioning a countable noun, use “a” or “an”. Afterward, use “the”, “this”, or “that”. Uncountable nouns generally don’t use articles the first time you mention them. You can use “the”, “this”, or “that” afterward.
For our ESL students and researchers, Wordvice found that subject-verb agreement was a common error type. So double-check that your verbs match singular or plural tense in agreement with your subject.
How to Correct Common Spelling Mistakes in your Resume
For obvious typographical errors, you will want to use a spell checker, and many exist online like Hemingway.app. But some mistakes require good judgment.
Hyphenation of modifiers is a major source of spelling errors. When two or more words function as one idea to describe a noun, and those words directly precede the noun, use hyphens. If they follow the noun, do not hyphenate that descriptive phrase. Do not hyphenate proper nouns.
- You should use hyphens whenever a series of modifiers would make the sentence unclear.
- Some fixed phrases always use hyphens, so double-check a dictionary.
- “Very” and adverbs ending in –ly are never hyphenated in phrases.
- Prefixes like “ex-”, “mid-”, and “re-” usually require hyphens.
If you’re still not convinced about the importance of proofreading your resume, check out what has been declared The Worst Resume Ever by Business Insider.
Be sure to check out the rest of the Wordvice Workshop!
