Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Proofreading

A few days ago a friend asked me if I would be willing to put a friend of his in contact with the CEO of a company where his friend wanted to work. I said I would be glad to do so. My friend, who is a successul Internet entrepreneur, forwarded me an email from his friend with her resume and cover letter. I forwarded the email to the CEO of the company and cc'ed my friend. Within hours the CEO replied saying he had forwarded the information to the appropriate person. But a few hours later he sent us another email telling us that my friend's friend had already applied for a job in his company and that she had misaddressed her original cover letter to another company. This seemed like a particularly serious mistake given that she was applying for an administrative position in which attention to details was very important.

Not only had my friend's friend blown her chances of getting the job, even though she had an endorsement directly into the CEO, but she had embarrassed her friend who had gone out of his way to help her (by asking me to make the connection). Why did I tell this story to the boys? Cindy and I often give them a hard time when their school work, or anything else they do for that matter, has any typos or mistakes. The boys typical response is that an extra space, comma or letter is not a big deal. And it is probably true that in most circumstances a small error wont make a big difference (unless you are programming a spaceship for a Mars landing of course). Yet if we don't get into the habit of always proofreading and double-checking what we do, a mistake will at some point catch up to us - like it did for my friend's friend. I, for example, proofread every email I send (even if it is a silly one to a friend). And I am amazed at the number of emails that I get with typos and errors. Now, let me proofread this post before I embarras myself. I hope my spellchecker is working...

2 comments:

Unknown said...

in the first sentence of the second paragraph, you said "even thought" - it should be "even though" :)

puchanix said...

Thanks for the correction!