The other day I was more than a little dismayed when a friend discovered not one, but two typos in my resume.

Two. Typos.

What’s the big deal? you might ask. Well, I’ve been applying for full-time work for months. With that resume, I might add. Applying for editing jobs. Typos are not the best advertisement for an editor.

Have you ever proofread something only to find out that maybe you hadn’t caught everything?

I was mortified to say the least. After hastily correcting my resume, I reposted it on various job-related sites. Now I wonder how many of the rejections I’ve received were because of those typos. This is how I felt.

I’m reminded of a paper I wrote in high school for U.S. History. I’d worked my butt off to write the perfect paper. But my teacher took off 15 points—five points each for three typos.

Over the years, I have queried manuscripts only to discover typos in them after sending them off. Some of those manuscripts were for contracted books.

I have found that while some reviewers readily overlooked manuscript typos, they would not forgive a typo in a query letter. It could be because a query letter isn’t very long. A typo there, like in a resume, seems to have a blinking-neon-sign-level of egregiousness.

I may have achieved the badge in the screenshot above (given for the NYT Connections puzzle), but perfection has been elusive elsewhere.

I saw a zinnia the other day that had a quiet level of perfection—petals perfectly presented. So, of course, I took a photo of it, only to realize the photo was off center. But I didn’t take another one. Instead, I posted it here because it was perfect for this post on my lack of perfection.

Which reminds me of something I heard about the other day: kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. Maybe you’ve heard of it. If not, take a look at this video found at the Japanese Food Craftsman YouTube channel.

Mugi-urushi is the adhesive made to seal the refitted pieces of pottery. Here is another video for how that is made. The artisan in the first video (link in the paragraph above) used different colors of lacquer to fill in the seams in the newly aligned ceramic piece before adding gold powder. This is called the maki-e technique.

Screenshot from the Japanese Food Craftsman video

The artisan mentioned, “Kintsugi is about finding beauty in imperfection.”

The cracks in the pottery weren’t ignored. Instead, they became veins of gold in what was once broken. I’m comforted by that.

Admitting to imperfection is not an excuse to avoid doing my best or to skip proofreading to find every typo in a piece of writing. But it takes the pressure off when I realize I’ve missed one. Or two. 😉

Random rabbit sighting

Failure sign from somewhere on the internet. Other photos by L. Marie.