Proofreading Your Articles in 6 Easy Steps

As usual, I sat down to the keyboard with too many things to write about without enough time to write about them all. Proofreading Your Article in 6 Easy Steps passed the Red Dress test. Red Dress? You don't know about that "Little Red Dress" in a sea of "Little Black Dresses? Read my article Too Many Ideas, Too little Time to Write About Them. The idea for this article was just one of a dozen article ideas that resulted from a conversation with a friend a few days ago concerning the duties of an editor. Too many people, especially the neophyte wordsmith believes that we are here to correct their mistakes. We are here to correct their mistakes to a certain degree but we aren't here to correct their spelling errors, typos, and common mistakes in grammar, those are all things that they should have caught during their proofreading process. Editors, at least the good ones, are willing to guide a writer to help them become better writers but no editor is willing to do the writer's work for them.

Most editors would love to be able to attach detailed, personal notes to every form rejection note that they send out, unfortunately, as a rule our workload precludes that. For those of us editors here at Factoidz we have a way of offering guidance to our community of aspiring writers as we offer guidance to all aspiring writers everywhere at once by publishing articles like this one. Much has been written about proofreading techniques already and more will be written about it in the future by other writing professional. Why is that? When it comes to proofreading there isn't any one perfect technique. Professional writers have to discover the one technique that works best for them and then stick with that technique, using it faithfully on every manuscript that they produce. The suggestions that I'm about to offer you here are just ways to help you get started in developing your own proofreading techniques.

1. The first step in proofreading your first draft should be to run it through your word processor's spell checker. These are great programs but you have to remember that there are certain errors that they will never catch. No spell checker will catch a typo if the typo is an actual word but not the word(s) you wanted to use. A perfect example of that occurred when I typed the first draft to this article, I had meant to type "any one" but had typed "anyone" instead. The spell checker didn't catch that typo because "anyone is a real word and was spelled correctly. If you have a spell checker that runs in conjunction with a contextual grammar checker it might or might not catch such errors.

2. Technology is great but as I pointed out above, it does have its limitation. The second step in your proofreading procedure should be to print your article out on your printer. Even if you're submitting the final draft electronically, this is a vital step in your proofreading process. Take it from me it's much easier to proofread a hard copy then it's to proofread from the computer screen. With a hard copy you can mark the locations of the mistakes as you find them, penciling in the corrections as you go, and then make all the changes at one time. By making all the changes on the hard copy first, you have the opportunity to read it after the changes were made to see if it reads correctly. Once you're satisfied with the changes on the hard copy, make the changes on the computer and then print out a new hard copy.

3. The third step in proofreading our copy is to read the revised copy aloud. You may feel silly doing this at first but it's very important because it forces you to slow down. People read silently faster than they read aloud so reading something aloud, actually hearing the text as well as seeing the text, helps you to catch errors that you would otherwise miss.

4. The fourth step is to employing a cooling off period. Put you masterpiece aside for 24 to 48 hours, and then go back and proofread it again. I'll guarantee you that you will find errors that you didn't find when you proofed it the first day.

5. The fifth step is to have a trusted third party proofread it. It's a well-known fact that most of us are far too close to our own creations to find all our mistakes. We love our words and may not be able to cut some of those words from our manuscript even if we know they are serving no useful purpose and we need to cut something out to bring it within the allowed word count. Just be sure you picked someone who is qualified to act as an editor and it's someone whose opinion you valued. Me, I'm lucky because I'm married to a retired schoolteacher.

6. The sixth step is slow, tedious, and often producing meaningless text but it works like a charm for me. To employ this method you read your text from right to left, from the bottom of the page to the top.

Well, that's enough to get you started out on your proofreading career. Believe it or not, it's not impossible to submit error free copy; many of the contributors to this site do just that on a regular bases and we love them because it makes our jobs so much easier.