Pointing out other people’s spelling and grammar mistakes has become an ingrained pastime on the Internet. No email, website, comment, or tweet is immune to the grammar police! Companies who make mistakes are criticized and lose business. Experts, scientists, politicians, and celebrities have all fallen victim to a misspelled word, misplaced comma, or off-the-cuff remark and their careers suffer.
Perfection Versus Good Enough
It is necessary to have perfect job search documents such as resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and biographies. Other people are searching diligently for those issues and if they find a misspelled word in your resume, you will probably you may not be considered for the job.
Training the Brain
The most important point of this issue is that spelling and grammatical errors do not mean that the author does not know the correct spelling or proper grammar. Linguistic research and scientific tests have shown that as people form habits, like typing or grouping words together to form sentences, the neurons in the brain change to make these habits more automated so they take less mental energy.
If you consistently misspell the word among as amoung, that habit has helped your brain to make that mistake through repetition and automation. It is not a case of a lack of knowledge.
With linguistic and neurological research to back us up, we can understand such mistakes. But recruiters and hiring managers are not going to forgive mistakes in job search documents. It is very important to have well-written, absolutely error-free emails, resumes, cover letters, and LinkedIn profiles to help you achieve your career goals.
Suggestions for Error-Free Documents
As you are writing your email response or resume, be sure to give yourself plenty of time. A resume that is written in 30 minutes and mailed out to the recruiter is much more likely to have spelling and grammar mistakes than documents that you have taken time with. Write your resume or email and let it sit.
If you reread the document immediately, you will read what you intended to write, not what you actually typed. Letting the document sit for at least a few hours is good; but a few days is better! Then go back and reread what you have written. You will immediately see grammar, spelling, and punctuation issues to correct.
If possible, ask someone whose grammar and spelling skills you trust to read your documents and make suggestions. You do not have to implement all their suggestions, but they might catch an issue that you have overlooked multiple times.
The job search process is difficult and stressful without the added strain of finding out after sending the resume that you misspelled the name of the company!