Our proofreading course provides many tips that can help you improve your technique.
A common practice is to read the document aloud. This helps make sense of the writing and any grammatical errors or confusing sentences will be more obvious.
If you’re too embarrassed to read it to yourself, try getting a colleague to read it back to you instead. This also has the added advantage of giving you a break from the document and getting someone else’s feedback.
Feedback is valuable because someone else will often spot mistakes that you have missed and vice versa.
Another tip is to not check for every type of mistake at once. It’s more productive to check for spelling errors in one sitting and then for grammatical errors in the next etc.
Proofing this way will ensure you are not overwhelmed with mistakes and also makes you concentrate on one area at a time.
We all know spell check is a life saver, but it’s important not to be overly reliant on it.
Spell check can spot most spelling mistakes but if the word is in the wrong context it will not flag it up.
An example of getting caught in the spell checker trap is the word “too” which can be confused with “to” and “two”. Your spell check might not be able to recognise the meaning of the word within the sentence and could easily miss the spelling error.
This leads us to another tip for checking your spelling which is to read the document backwards. This may sound strange but it does focus your mind on the spelling of each word as we are always at risk of missing a commonly misspelled word.
Names are particularly important and usually trip up even the most experienced editors. There are so many different spellings for common names that we think we know how to spell so it is worth slowing down and checking each letter at a time.
See our proofreading course