Most of us have heard the words ‘proofread your work’ at some point in our lives. We are told to proofread our essays, CVs, cover letters, emails, blogs, and tweets. We are also told not to just use spell check, as it doesn’t always pick up on problems that the human eye can detect.
Proofreading is important as it can add power to your writing; without it, your work has a higher chance of containing errors. Errors, such as poor sentence structure, typographical errors, misspellings, tense confusion, and grammatical mistakes can really undermine your potential and credibility as an applicant for a new job, as a blogger, a writer, or an academic.
Students in particular really feel the benefits of academic proofreading, as not doing so can often result in the loss of up to as much as 10% of their overall grade. Good proofreading can make all the difference between your work making a positive or a negative impact upon the reader.
Imagine you are applying for a job and see an ad for a role that seems ideal for you; the right salary, the right position, in the right location. You feel that you have all the right requirements and experience to apply, so you email your CV and add a brief personal statement. Then you hit the send button and forget about it.
A few days letter you go back to your email and realise you have misspelt the job title and missed out some vital words and letters. This may not matter for some jobs, but there are many roles that specifically require excellent English skills; in this instance, your lack of proofreading may have cost you your dream job.
You want your reader to be able to focus on the content of your writing, not the mistakes and errors that have been overlooked and remain in your writing. When your written work is perfect, it shows others that you pay attention to detail and care about the things that you produce. This gives your writing added strength and authority.
It is important to note that over 70% of interviewers discard applicants based on the typos, grammatical and spelling mistakes in a personal statement or a CV. This demonstrates how great the negative impact of errors in written work can be, and further shows how important proofreading actually is.
If you want your CV to be taken seriously, and your essays to make their points effectively, and your short story to be safe from being instantly binned, you must proofread your work before you send it off anywhere. Then you proofread it again. Then get a family or friend to proofread it after that. Then, depending on how important you feel the document is, even pay a professional proofreading service to proofread it too.
Proofreading services can offer you an extensive range of products that you might not be aware of. They can make all your written words look professional. Your message will be conveyed much more clearly to your intended audience.
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