Careers

Resume Grammar Errors to Avoid

By Alison Doyle, About.com GuideApril 16, 2013

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Resume With Pen When you are writing a resume, it's easy to spell check and it should be easy to pick up glaring typos. It's not always that easy to pick up grammatical errors, and there are some mistakes that are made more often than others.

Brad Hoover, CEO, Grammarly, reports that there are five errors on a typical job seeker's resume, and most of these issues (nearly 60%) are grammatical.

The average job seeker makes more than 1.5 punctuation errors. Women make fewer mistakes than men with women job seekers making an average of four grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes in their resume, while male job applicants average more than six mistakes.

The top mistakes job seekers make on their resumes include verb tense, hyphen use, formatting, and careless mistakes. Here are the top five resume errors:

Hyphen use (e.g. entry-level)
Verb tense (Led vs. leads, etc.)
Formatting issues: Make sure your fonts and bullets are the same throughout the resume.
Education information: Bachelor's Degree vs. Bachelor
Careless spelling mistakes: The most commonly misspelled words were simple words such as "and" "planned" and "materials."

The other issue is that the word could be spelled correctly, but used in the wrong context. Plus, it's really hard to catch your own mistakes. Sometimes, I see what I think I wrote rather than what is actually on the page.

Reading your resume and cover letter out loud can help with that and can also serve as a final double-check. Asking someone else to read your job application materials is helpful, too.

On a personal note, I signed up for the free trial of Grammarly, then bought the annual version when my trial was up. It's definitely catching more mistakes than when I just used Word's spell and grammar checker. Now, I use Microsoft Word's checker first, then run Grammarly to catch the rest of my errors. You can also use Grammarly's online grammar check for free.