How to avoid embarrassment by proofreading your resume

Proofreading is critical but often forgotten. How do I know?

Ahem, let me tell you embarrassing proofreading story

You might notice my blog posts have a similar section at the bottom. In this area, I list photo credit, offer an option to sign up for my blog,  and tell you how to get to my resume packages.  This section is often copied to other blog posts.

Recently, one of my clients generously shared a blog post I wrote to the LinkedIn Job Seeker Premium Group, entitled “How to reply to job rejection with amazing grace.”  This post got tremendous traffic starting about a week ago.

A week later I told my son, Tim, about the post and he read it out loud to me. As he read, I read along silently with him. I noticed that the copy at the bottom with an invitation to call me had the one number incorrect, instead of 574, it had 564.

Yes, pretty embarrassing proofreading error!

I’m embarrassed to even tell you I did this. This error would have been bad if it was just that post since more than 7,000 people accessed it in the past week. But, I added the same boilerplate content to the bottom of 28 or more posts I wrote in 2015.

There are many other ways to contact me. The phone number was correct in other places.  It still was an error that I never caught even though I read it over multiple times.

Watch out for errors in your resume

If you are not carefully proofreading, you won’t see any errors. A word traded for a word will not show up on auto-correct.

Try these proofreading tips:

• Take time to read it out loud. You notice errors more when you read out loud. It slows down the reading process.
• Walk away from it. You get used to content when you keep reading it over and over.
• Read your content from the bottom to the top. We get used to content and need to see it from a different perspective to see errors.
• Let the PDF reader read it for you. Most PDF applications will read out loud to you if you select the option.

I spent time editing all the posts with the wrong phone number. But it also taught me a lesson. Double-check everything you write!

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net