Tips to Improve Your Proofreading Skills

As a freelance proofreader, you should make sure your work is completely free from grammatical errors, issues with punctuation, and spelling mistakes. It's important that you conduct a full proofread to eliminate any errors in your final version.

Easy Tips for Proofreading an Essay Effectively

Check Names Are Error Free

It's easy to get really into your essay and miss some of the key components, such as capital letters for names. If you get into the flow of writing, it's completely normal to let the words run away with you and forget to check. This isn't an issue. It's important to let your creativity flow to get the most out of your story.

However, it's also essential to go back through and edit your writing to eliminate misspelled words and punctuation mistakes. Missing these can really make your writing look unattractive and unprofessional to the reader. Names are one of the most commonly missed issues. This is usually because, with today's technology, we expect Microsoft Word or Google Docs to go through and autocorrect for us.

Depending on the types of names you've used, this may not be the case. Run through using Ctrl+F to find all of the names in your writing and make sure there's a capital on each one.

Your proofreading software

Use Proofreading Software for Your Editing and Proofreading Jobs

There are a variety of different proofreading tools available on the internet. Grammarly is extremely popular due to its accessibility features. You can use it on the go with your phone or tablet, or when you're comfy on your PC at home. 

Grammarly even offers features to connect to your other writing apps, so you don't need to run your writing through two systems to get it checked over.

Whilst these online proofreader services are brilliant and can do almost everything for you, it's important to understand what your mistakes are to prevent them in the future. 

If you find a common mistake that you aren't picking up on, you should be aware of this to improve your writing in the future and increase the readability for your audience. 

Still, having access to reliable proofreading software can really bail you out when you don't have much time on your hands. 

Read the Essay Backwards to Highlight Writing Mistakes

Don't start at the beginning of the essay. Your mind will automatically gloss over the mistakes and won't force you to make the corrections. You already know your story, so your brain will cover up your mistakes and correct the errors in your writing for you. This means that the lines will look perfect to you, but when it comes to publishing your works, you'll be suddenly struck by the horror of your mistakes when it's already too late.

Working your way backwards through the content until you find yourself back at the beginning enables you to isolate each sentence and pick out any errors. Being familiar with what sentence is coming up next can sometimes cause your eyes to skip past the mistake. 

If you aren't following along with the story, your brain can't predict what's coming next and remove the typos.

Reviewing your writing skills

Print Out the Essay Before Your Final Draft

Nearly everything we do in 2023 is electronic. It's convenient and it saves a lot of resources having access to everything either online or stored on our PC. But this can remove the beauty and practicality of reading a physical piece of writing and can sometimes actually be less enjoyable.

Proofreading can sometimes require a manual touch. Printing out your work to proofread manually can help you spot things that aren't always apparent due to computer lighting. 

Staring at the PC for too long can have a negative impact on our eyesight and this can be the reason why we miss punctuation errors and fail to correct grammar.

We're also so used to looking at screens in our everyday lives that our brains might tune out errors due to other distractions. These could be adverts on the page or other tabs that we might have open that appear more interesting.

Get yourself a hard copy of your writing or documents and take your time going through every line with your finger guiding you. 

If you're still struggling, there are some handy resources out there that can help even a beginner to perform the most professional standard proofreading job within just a few short hours. There are also lots of online courses which are great at helping you to notice some of your biggest pain points and correct them throughout your future writing.

Reading is the Key to a Good Proofreading Job

It sounds obvious, but reading is the key to becoming a good proofreader. The more books you read, the easier it will be to select the right word choice, understand how punctuation should look and highlight those common spelling errors to help you craft perfect sentences.

The more you read, the more you'll understand what a reader wants to see. You'll develop your own voice and syntax and the words will just come naturally to the page. Reading is a great way to expand your writing experience and complete amazing essays and stories, while unknowingly sharpening your proofreading and language skills.

Published Books for Proofreaders

While we're on the subject of reading, there are some amazing published works that focus specifically on helping students to develop themselves as a proofreader or to land their first job as online proofreading professionals. They're sometimes a bit of a cliche, but books such as Proofreading & Copy Editing for Dummies are actually incredibly helpful at ticking off some of those quick fixes and helping you to move forward quickly on your proofreading journey.

Copyediting and proofreading for beginners

How Important is Proofreading and Editing?

Using a combination of the tips above as well as allowing yourself plenty of time to proofread your writing will help you to pick out common errors and mistakes and complete your final draft in style.

Learning to proofread effectively to give yourself constructive criticism is an invaluable skill that will make your websites, books, and documents much more popular and successful.

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