As a novelist, screenwriter and SEO copywriter, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that words are my life. In my younger years, when I was a professional film actor, it was the spoken word that held my focus. But since then it’s all been about the written word.

Like most SEO experts I am obsessive about what words to use, in what order, and why. On the top end of that obsession you deal with issues of thematics, tone and voice. Of narrative and of structure. And at the bottom end you deal with spelling, punctuation and grammar.

This perfectionism (because that is surely what all writers suffer from) means that even something as mundane as an email or an sms / text, must be written well and correctly spelled. Language after all is a symphony made up of an endless amount of notes. And it only takes one ‘bum’ note to spoil your enjoyment of the music. As my late sainted mum used to say, “If you say it correctly, you’ll spell it correctly”. And in the digital age, we can perhaps flip that to read: “If you spell it correctly, you’ll say it correctly”.

Imagine my surprise then, when I read how Laszlo Bock (such a great name – must pinch that for my next novel!) Google’s head of HR, revealed that Google instantly delete any CVs that contain spelling mistakes.

Apparently the Human Resources department at Google receives over 50,000 resumes per week. And, so Laszlo told Business Insider, if you have so much as a single spelling mistake on your resume, it ends up in the trash.

Laszlo, who has himself reputedly reviewed over 20,000 resumes, said that upward of 58 percent of resumes Google receives have “Spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes, or noun-verb agreement errors”.

When quizzed as to why he is so obsessive about spelling mistakes, et al, Laszlo said: “Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality”.

Which is pretty much what we writers have been saying all along!
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