Resume Grammar & Proofreading Checker

Every check this tool runs, exactly as coded

Most checkers describe themselves in marketing terms; this one can afford to be literal, because the list below is rendered from the engine's own check definitions at build time — the words you are reading are the same strings the code carries, so the page cannot claim a check the tool doesn't run. Findings come in two severities: fix means something is wrong; consistency means neither side is wrong and only the mixing is.

• Tense consistency across rolesfix

  Bullets under a role that has ended should not open with a present-tense verb ("Manage", "Lead"). Bullets under your current role may use present or past tense — but not both mixed together; the minority side is flagged. Matched against a map of the ~70 verbs resumes actually open with.

• First-person pronounsfix

  "I", "I'm", "I've", "me", "my", "myself" — resume convention drops them. "Led the migration", not "I led the migration". Same pattern the ATS checker scores.

• Capitalizationfix

  Three patterns: bullets that open lowercase, lowercase month names in date ranges ("may 2023"), and known tool or technology names written lowercase mid-line ("javascript", "excel") — checked case-sensitively against the display forms in our shared keyword lexicon plus a curated list of single-word brand names.

• Doubled wordsfix

  The same word twice in a row ("the the", "with with") — the classic leftover from editing a sentence in two passes.

• "A" vs. "an"fix

  "A" before a vowel sound or "an" before a consonant sound ("an new program"). A simple letter heuristic with an exception list ("a university", "an hour"); all-caps acronyms are skipped because their pronunciation is ambiguous.

• Spacing slipsfix

  A space before punctuation ("teams .") and double spaces inside a sentence. Wide multi-space runs are left alone — those are layout artifacts, and the ATS checker's column checks own them.

• Common resume misspellingsfix

  A lexicon of the misspellings that show up on real resumes — "managment", "recieve", "seperate", "acheived", "liason" and friends — each with its correction. Not a dictionary spell-check: a word outside this list is not checked.

• Bullet punctuation consistencyconsistency

  Whether bullets mix terminal periods with no-period endings. Either convention is fine — the minority side is reported so you can pick one and apply it everywhere.

• Number style consistencyconsistency

  Mixing numerals and spelled-out words for small counts across bullets ("5" in one bullet, "five" in another). Reported, not prescribed — both styles are legitimate; mixing them is the slip.

The score is equally literal. It starts at 100 and docks 4 points for every fix-severity finding and 1 point for every consistency call, floored at zero. That makes it a cleanliness meter, not a hiring predictor: 100 means none of these patterns were found, not that the resume is good — and a 60 with ten findings is usually twenty minutes of edits away from a 100.

A worked example, scored by the real engine

Here is a deliberately sloppy retail resume fragment, scored by the same engine the tool above runs, at the moment this page was built. It lands at 70/100 ("A few slips") with 9 findings across 7 checks:

Notice what a generic checker would have said about the same fragment: almost nothing. "Manage a team of 9 cashiers" is a perfectly grammatical sentence — it's only wrong because the role above it ended in 2022. "excel" is a real English word — it's only wrong because here it names the spreadsheet. Resume proofreading is mostly context, and the context is the document, not the sentence.

Why resumes break grammar checkers

A resume is written in a register that general-purpose tools are trained to correct. Bullets are sentence fragments with the subject deleted — that is the convention, not an error, yet it is the first thing a prose checker underlines. The implied first person means "I" is banned rather than required. And half of what reads as sloppiness to a recruiter is not ungrammatical at all: periods on some bullets and not others, "five" in one line and "5" in the next, a 2019 role still described in the present tense. Each line passes; the document fails.

That is why this typo checker judges lines against each other instead of against a grammar book. The tense check leans on the same structure parser as our free ATS resume checker to attach every bullet to its role and date range — without knowing which roles have ended, tense consistency isn't checkable at all. The brand-name capitalization check reuses the keyword lexicon behind our JD tools, and the misspelling pass carries 55 corrections for the errors that actually recur on resumes — "managment", "liason", "seperate" — rather than a full dictionary.

The honest limits, stated plainly: this is pattern matching, not language understanding. It cannot catch a misspelling outside its lexicon, a subject-verb disagreement, or a bullet that is grammatically clean and says nothing. It checks openers against a ~70-verb map, so an exotic verb passes unjudged, and the a/an check skips all-caps acronyms because nobody agrees on how they're pronounced. Treat a clean score as "the known failure patterns are absent", then read the resume aloud once — that pass still catches what no pattern can.

Two useful companions once the text is clean: the resume word count checker judges whether the now-polished text is the right length for your experience level, and the plain text converter produces the ATS-safe .txt version with the same corrected wording.