Teachers insist on correctness in areas such as spelling and capitalization. While you may think they are overly picky, consider this. A recent poll among employers indicated the following: “A telephone survey of 100 senior Canadian executives showed that more than a fifth of executives said a single typo on a resumé or cover letter could cost a potential employee a job, while 28 percent said two mistakes would kill their chances.”

It turns out that teachers aren’t the only ones who are picky. When you apply for a job, errors on your resumé or job application could prevent you from being interviewed or from being hired. It is important to be correct. It is important to know how to spell, how to look up the spellings of words, and how to capitalize when necessary. You can check both spelling and capitalization in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

As a final check, you can proofread your writing using a color-coding process that will help you recognize errors. In this lesson, you will learn a technique for editing in which you read a text and mark capitalization errors, and then reread the text and mark spelling errors.

You will begin by finding spelling and capitalization errors in practice sentences. In the last section, you will use the color-coding editing strategy to identify capitalization and punctuation errors in an excerpt from a magazine article.