online proofreading courseOur accredited online proofreading course teaches students how to work both on paper and on screen.

Working with copy on screen can be especially challenging. Problems can include eye strain and the inability to spot certain errors.

Here are a few tips to help our proofreading course students and graduates, as well as anyone who needs to read and edit documents on screen.

  • Avoid proofreading pages that you created yourself.
  • Save a copy of the page before proofreading it, in case you make changes that may have to be undone.
  • Use spellcheck and grammar-checking tools, such as those found in MS Word.
  • Subscription tools such as PerfectIt and Grammarly also help with proofreading and can be used in the beginning or once you’ve finished, to ensure that you haven’t missed anything.
  • This will give you a head start, but don’t trust these tools to find everything. Always double-check manually, as described in Lesson 01.
  • Magnify the page. You will never spot errors even at 100% onscreen. Magnify the page to 200%, or whatever size suits you.
  • Divide your proofreading into areas. First, check for spelling mistakes and grammar, then for punctuation, then house style and so on.
  • If you are reading a document with several components, such as text, photos and graphs, train yourself to read things in a set order, for example, edit the text first and then the photos and captions. This ensures that you don’t miss anything.

Our proofreading course offers plenty of opportunity to practice proofreading and editing a variety of texts, both on screen and off.

You can also use your assignments to explore the working practices that are the most comfortable and productive for you.

See our proofreading course