Is your job at risk because of poor spelling?

A  quick read through the search stats for this blog for the past 30 days made me laugh.

• sample of damn good medical assitstant resumes
• proffessional resume for medical assistant
• professional registed nurse resume
• resuem for facilities director
• resnume templates executive director of a foundation
• pastor’s resumse
• ample pastor reusmes
• executive diretor resume

Are you blaming your poor spelling on Autocorrect?

It is easy to make spelling errors and many people blame search mistakes on their phone or tablet’s autocorrect. Maybe most of the poor spelling errors above were from people searching too quickly or searching on their phone.

However, this poor spelling trend is also in emails that I receive. Perhaps you think I should be grateful that people can’t spell. It would make them need my resume writing skills, right? But though a professional resume writer can get people in the front door for an interview, the first time the job seeker writes something for the prospective hiring manager, their poor spelling will be exposed.

Improve your poor spelling, don’t just apologize!

In fact, I get emails that have a disclaimer about spelling and grammar, sometimes from top executives. But most of the time, the blame is the user who is in such a hurry that they hit send before they have proofread their message.

Despite computers, writing has not lost its importance and the ability to write well, spell well, and send quality communication is still valuable.

As a professional resume writer, spelling and grammar are both critical. It is not easy to catch errors when you have read and edited something multiple times. I have multiple ways of double-checking my work.

Looking for photos for this post, I found many examples that made me laugh and included three here but perhaps we should take a serious look at how to improve our poor spelling.

8 tips to improving your poor spelling

• Make sure you use spell check on everything. Yes, your phone and tablet both have spell check. Take that extra couple of minutes to check your work.
• Walk away from your writing for even 10 minutes, preferably longer, and then finish the email or document.
• Print it. Reading off-screen lets you see things differently.
• Read it backwards. Our eyes are trained to read in one direction so change it up.
• Use a PDF reader to proof documents. I know both Adobe Reader and FoxIt Reader have a read-out-loud feature. I call her “the lady” and when the computer voice reads the document and you listen, you will find mistakes if they are there.
• Read more. People who read more tend to write better and spell better because they see more words and see words in writing more often.
• Buy Spelling Power, I bought this when I briefly homeschooled one of my sons who hated spelling. But he loved the challenge of this book. He was a junior in high school so adults would benefit too.
• Hire a professional proofreader. I have many friends who are writing books, some of them are writing books on how to write things better. I was reading an e-book by a highly rated career writer and she missed taking out an edit. She left in part of an old concept when she replaced it with a new concept. A proofreader or editor would have caught that. I hired Davina Haisell, Shades of Crimson, who is an excellent editor for several projects.

Need help? Hire me, Julie Walraven, Certified Master Resume Writer. I can take the pain out of writing your resume and even make it fun. We work together to discover those forgotten contributions and position you to win your next role. To find out how, Click Here.

Photo credit: StockSnap_X4MUJHS00Y