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Your CV is a perfect way to showcase your education, soft and hard skills and a great opportunity to highlight your professional and academic achievements. Recruiters see how well and effectively you can get your point across to them, and that is the sole assessment of your candidacy. Hence, having a good and grammatically correct CV will help you have a good chance of getting that job or university. But a few typos in your resume will eventually lead you to a slump. 

So it becomes very important for you to proofread your CV. 

In this article, we will walk you through all the nitty-gritty of proofreading tips that will improve your resume. We will also look at how resume proofreading tricks will make your CV look professional and will make you stand out from the rest!

What is Proofreading?

Proofreading is the process of thoroughly examining a text for mistakes before it could be published or distributed. It is the final step of the writing process, during which you correct minor spelling and punctuation errors, typos, formatting problems, and ambiguities.

Proofreading your CV may save you from being rejected for the job you are applying for. It also enhances the quality of your CV and helps you highlight the most important points in your resume. Proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling will not only help your CV look professional but will also increase the impact of your work on the recruiter!

Also make sure to use a clean, professional, easy-to-read template when creating your resume. Here are some examples of templates you can use + some guidance on how to include hard skills, interests and structure on your CV.

How to Proofread Your CV

This is for all the newbies and fresh graduates who are still confused about making their CVs bulletproof. Then this is the perfect place for you. The term “proofreading” is a relatively new world for you, but by the end of this article, we promise you that you will be a pro at proofreading. 

With technological advances, there are many online services or resume checkers that enable you to proofread your CV. But the best way to proofread your resume is to read it aloud and again. With every pass, you will most likely find something that could sound better. You must carefully check for grammar and punctuation mistakes in every sentence of your resume. 

For the final check, you should pass it through online resume checkers to get rid of any tiny grammatical errors and inconsistencies. 

Six Tips to Improve Your CV

 

1. Start with a Fresh Mind

We recommend you proofread your CV in the mornings. This is because the morning light gives you a fresh and soothing feeling that helps you concentrate for a long period of time. It has been found that people have better recollection ability in the morning than in the evening.

So if you are a night owl, try to go over things again for a last check in the morning! Sometimes things that looked great in the evening, have a different look in the morning. This is why we advocate that you to start proofing your CV with a fresh mind, preferably in the morning.

2. Think Like an Employer

It is important to think like a recruiter when you are proofreading your CV. While you read aloud your CV, you must think about how an employer will take on your words. If the sentences sound too bland or overwhelming, then replace them with more inviting words.

What are the most important items they’ll check for on your resume? Your qualifications, work experience, and skills. You can get some hints from the job description. Examine the job responsibilities and the experience that the employer is seeking. Then, using your job history and expertise as a guide, highlight the elements that correspond to the job role. 

This will not only enhance your CV but will also help you to get a clearer picture of what the job is all about. You must highlight your skills that match the requirements for the role. This will show the employer that you are the right person for the role, and your possibilities of getting the job will increase exponentially. 

One effective strategy to highlight your CV is to quantify your resume achievements with numbers and data, whether it’s the amount of revenue you generated, the costs you reduced, or the processes you streamlined for greater efficiency. Here are some of the best – and easiestways to quantify your resume (Revenue increased by x, profit or sales generated, time-saving…).

3. Less can be more

Employers and recruiters have to go through thousands of CVs every day for a particular role. They clearly do not have the time to go through each and every CV in a detailed manner. It is your job to make the task easier for them. Hence, it is imperative that you keep your CV concise but constructive. This can be done by highlighting the important skills and experience while editing out the unnecessary details. Use bullet points and make sure to keep sentences short.

You can check the details of your job posting and chalk out the important skills necessary for the role. Accordingly, you may remove all the irrelevant skills and experience. As soon as you finish your first draft, you should start editing.

You must thoroughly experiment with sentence length and structure. And if you have a habit of using the passive voice excessively, you should avoid that. You should also check whether there are a lot of superfluous terms in your work, like “there is,” “there are,” “due to the fact that,” or not. Phrases like this tend to make your CV crowded. 

4. Read It, Line by Line, Word by Word

As mentioned before, you must focus on manually proofreading your CV first and for that reading it line by line and word by word is very important. Try reading aloud to compel yourself to speak each word and to hear how the words blend together. You may skim over mistakes or make unconscious corrections if you read silently or too rapidly.

It is advised that you use a hard copy for proofreading because you can encircle or highlight the points that need correction. Moreover, our brains don’t read texts on screens with the same level of depth or attention that they do when they’re printed

After you’ve finished editing and reviewing your resume on your computer, print a black-and-white copy and go through it again. Cover the lines underneath the one you’re reading with a blank sheet of paper. This method prevents you from passing over potential blunders. 

5. Spell check Wisely

With the advent of artificial intelligence, spelling mistakes in your CV have almost become obsolete. There are tons of online spellchecking services you can use to make your CV spell-proof. But even after multiple passes of spelling checks, it is possible that your CV still has some mistakes. 

This is because many online services tend to overlook contextual spelling mistakes. You must also keep in mind that homonyms (e.g., “they’re,” “their,” “their”) and some typos (e.g., “he” for “the”) will not be caught by a spell checker. Although AI has made spell check quite easy, contextual proofreading is still an area that requires immense development.


So what should you do in such situations?

Manually, you can read your CV in and out, and that should eliminate almost all of your mistakes. But if you still think that there might be mistakes that can not be caught by your eye, then we suggest you use AI tools like Grammarly, Slick Write, and so on. 

They excel in correcting homonyms and even contextual spelling mistakes!

 

6. How to structure your CV well

Your CV must be well structured because this will help the recruiter to access your CV in minimal time. By “well structured,” we mostly mean that your CV must not be overcrowded and all the sections must be organized. For example, all your skills, qualifications, projects, and experience should be under different sections. 

To be more specific, you may place the qualifications section at the top, followed by your skills, and lastly, you may include projects and experience. This allows the recruiter to get a clear picture of your CV when he reads it from top to bottom. You must also refrain from using too many fonts in your CV. 

Make sure your name, address, phone number, and email address are prominently shown on your CV and any contact information, ideally towards the top.

Top Proofreading Tools to Use

Proofreading tools give you a major competitive advantage. you can put your resume through a grammar checker to quickly point out mistakes. They make it easier for you to work quickly and write well. Although built-in spell checks can identify certain errors, they are pale in comparison to current spell checkers like Grammarly, Ginger, ProWritingAid, and Hemingway.

We have compiled a list of 5 proofreading tools that you can use for your CV to get rid of errors and enhance them!

1. Grammarly

Grammarly is the most precise grammar correction tool available on the market right now. This website not only assists you in locating your grammatical problems but also provides appropriate explanations for each inaccuracy. This is a major benefit for folks who do not speak English as their first language. Moreover, it understands the context of each sentence and enhances them accordingly!

It also has a plagiarism checker that will assist you in identifying duplicate text in a copy. It also double-checks the word count and provides comprehensive information on the subject you’re working on. The best part about Grammarly is that it can be used in Google Docs, Gmail, social media sites, and so on. 

Pricing:
For basic writing suggestions, Grammarly is free. 

  • Premium (for style, clarity improvements, and additional advanced corrections) starts at $12 per month (After discount). 
  • Business (for professional and clear communication for teams of 3 to 149) starts at $15 per month.

2. Ginger

The finest grammar checker on the planet is Ginger. It’s one of the best online proofreading tools for quickly correcting your sentences with minimal effort. Start utilizing Ginger software if you want to boost your writing and productivity while on the move. It will provide you with simple features that will allow you to improve your literary skills without making mistakes. 

It will ensure that your writing is excellent, but if you want to make modifications on the run, you must stay online. It works on both Microsoft Office and browsers, which makes editing your CV easier and hassle-free. 

Pricing:
The Chrome extension is free and offers you a 7-day trial. 

  • $29.96 per month if paid monthly.
  • $12.48 per month if paid yearly.
  • $9.99 per month if paid every two years.

3. Prowritingaid

Over 1 million authors, editors, students, and professionals use ProWritingAid, a fantastic proofreading software. It provides detailed evaluations of the sentence structure, punctuation errors, repetitive phrases, and other aspects of your material to help you improve your writing. You can even use ProWritingAid as your personal coach for writing as it is extremely user-friendly. 

Speaking of which, it has a Chrome extension that helps you with real-time correction of spelling and grammatical mistakes. It is suitable for both fiction and nonfiction content, and if you want to add a specific tone to your content, go ahead with this tool. 

Pricing:
The Chrome extension is free of charge, but the plagiarism checker and the desktop version require a subscription. 

  • $20 per month if paid monthly.
  • $5.83 per month if paid yearly.
  • $240 for lifetime access, which requires a one-time payment. 
  • Apart from above plans,prowritingaid offers free trail on their plans.

4. Hemingway App

One of the most popular online proofreading tools for diversion writing is the Hemingway app. It has a simple editing tool that can help you enhance your writing. You may paste your material or paragraphs into the Hemingway App editor, and it will immediately highlight any errors and give you suggestions if needed.

It gives your content a readability score. It also helps you increase the readability of your content by pointing out and breaking down sentences that are way too complex to understand. It is an amazing tool to polish your content. 

Pricing: 
The web browser version is free to use, but the desktop version requires a one-time payment of $19.99 for lifetime access. 

Conclusion

We hope by now, proofreading is no longer a new term for you. We have successfully walked you through the basic to advanced techniques of proofreading your CV. You may be confident that if you take the above tips into consideration, you will have not only learned how to construct a CV but also remedied any errors. No longer do you have to second guess yourself and now express your interest on your CV?

The tools will drastically make your resume look as well as sound better. When you’re satisfied with the final version of your CV, get it printed out and prepare for the interview you have been waiting for so long! We hope that proofreading is no more a big task for you with our guidance. 

And one last tip before ending this article. Consider whether your aim and most relevant abilities are apparent and whether the hiring manager will notice your acceptability or capacity after reading at least half of the first page before submitting. Remember proofreading is not exclusive to your CV, you need to also proofread your cover letter!

So that is all for this article. Stay tuned for the next one!

 

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