My daughter, Katy, received a text from a potential suitor that said “Your so pretty!” She showed me the text with a horrified look on her face and said “I’m sorry. If he doesn’t know the difference between your/you’re and to/two/too, then I am not interested!”
In my business, we receive hundreds of resumes for jobs per week and at least half of them have some sort of grammar and/or spelling error. Sometimes we interview them anyway because they have the experience that we are looking for, they wrote a “nice” cover letter or we decide to forgive that “one tiny mistake.” But here is the hard and fast truth: The easiest way to determine if the candidate is serious about the position is whether or not they took the extra 2 minutes to run spell check and proof their work. It really isn’t hard. It really doesn’t take much time. It really does make a difference.
So for those candidates that are continuously asking me for interviewing help, my best advice to get the interview is to please do a review of your materials before you send them. Better yet, have your neighbor, friend, significant other read your resume and cover letter, just for that extra set of eyes. And for my clients who ask, Yes! Grammar counts! Just ask my beloved teenage daughter!
P.S. May all boys within dating age of my daughter make grammatical errors like these. Amen.
I absolutely agree. Whether it’s right or wrong to do so, I judge an individual’s intelligence by the way s/he writes.
It is appalling that many college grads, and even those with advanced degrees, are incapable of writing two sentences without error. It’s sad, this ‘dumbing down’ of America. (An online MBA student once asked for my help. He had to write one paragraph on a topic in my field. His draft revealed that he was completely incapable of writing a coherent sentence. How had he advanced through high school and college, and into an MBA program? Did his teachers care that he was essentially illiterate? Were they somehow forced to advance him through the system? I knew that rewriting his response would be enabling, so I just made a suggestion or two. He got an “A.” Today, he has his MBA. His speech and writing, though, will likely limit his career advancement.) The tragedy is that as far as these people know, their writing is just fine. They can review their materials a dozen times before submitting them, but they will see no flaws. A sad commentary, to be sure.