Clips with typos?

I know this is completely unrelated, but I recently had a job opening at the paper I'm at now. You'd be amazed -- really amazed, I'm tellin' ya -- how many people have errors in their cover letters. Of the 80 resumes I received, I'd venture a guess that 20 of them, at least, had an error in the cover letter or resume. I'm not proofreading these things for missing commas, I'm talking about errors that jump out of you. Hell, I've got an easy last name and at least 10 of the people who applied couldn't get that right.

Clips with typos? I'm not sure. If it's something glaring, I wouldn't send it, but it sounds like something most editors, upon reading your clips, wouldn't notice. Then again, if you've got some other outstanding clips without errors, you may want to go with those.

 

Wow, those are big'uns!

 

Excuse me. Out "at" you. Not out "of" you. I proofread my cover letter a little better than I do my posts on here.

 

And believe me, I know mistakes happen. I once applied for a job where everything was fine in my cover letter, resume, clips, except for one thing. Throughout the letter, I refer to the newspaper as only half its name. Instead of, for example, "Podunk Times-Bugle," I referred to it as the "Podunk Bugle." I never got a call back, and I shouldn't have. Like Ira said, your clips, resume and cover letter are your first impression. If you're looking for a job and they want somebody who can write clean, accurate copy, or design clean, accurate pages, they're going to find somebody who can, you know, spell things right on their cover letter. Or I would think.

 

I once put a clips package, including a paper-specific cover letter, in the wrong envelope. I got a reply from the editor that implied he liked my clips but couldn't get past the fact that the cover letter was addressed to an entirely different person and didn't seem to have much to do with his paper. Never got a reply from the other paper which received the clips package intended for him. Whoops. Lesson learned.

 

When I was a young writer, it was not uncommon for SEs to ask at a job interview or on the phone before a job interview, "How heavily are you edited?"

I felt like saying, "Can't you tell from my clips?"

If the copy is flawless, chances are it's a very good desk's work. Some writers turn in perfect copy, but they are rare.

 

*snerk* You win.

I know how to use them. Typing early in the morning is just not my forte. But heh.

 

I once copied and pasted the body of a cover letter onto new letterhead. Only, I didn't just copy the body.

So, my letter read like this:

Dear Jason Voorhees,

Dear Michael Meyers, I ....

It was basically a letter inside a letter, and included the references to the original paper I had applied to.

Dumb, dumb mistake. Needless to say, I never heard back from them...

 

Agreed, a lot of writers I've talked with tell me they tend to write "dirty," copy, which needs to be cleaned up on the edit desk.

 

Sure, I have a number of good clips that I later found typos in. We're a three-person staff and my editor doesn't actually read our copy. His copy? Slaps it on the page without a first read. We have to edit it and force him to reflow the story to the page. I can only offer the explanation that he's a moron. The other writer and I have brought this to light many times, but nothing has changed and our clips are still shit now.