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Objective
In this lesson, you will learn a variety of strategies for carefully and effectively
proofreading your writing. Since each writer is different, some strategies will
work better for you than for other people. Using guidance from this lesson;
try the various options presented, and choose your favorite proofreading strategy.
What's So Important About Proofreading?
Would you go to the prom in a gorgeous dress but leave your hair dirty and uncombed?
Would you wear an expensive tuxedo and your oldest, smelliest athletic shoes?
Probably not-- unless this was an intentional choice-- part of some crafted
look. Turning in a paper that has not had thorough proofreading is like being
all dressed up while forgetting important details of your appearance.
Proofreading is the task of slowly and carefully reading your writing
to find misspellings, mistaken words, incorrect punctuation, typographical errors
("typos"), and other small errors. Although proofreading can be tedious
work, it is an essential part of the writing process.
Generally, proofreading is one of the very last steps that writers take when
finalizing a piece of writing. It is different from editing, but many of the
same techniques can be used for both editing and proofreading.
Editing is part of the revision process, whereby you check your writing
for:
Large issues like:
o Thesis statement clarification,
o Content development (adding or deleting details),
o Organization (changing paragraphs or sections), and
o Developing strong introductions and conclusions.
Small issues like:
o Improving sentence clarity and variety,
o Correcting grammar and mechanics errors,
o Checking for strong word choices, and
o Correcting spelling and punctuation.
Proofreading is part of the final process before your writing is ready
for "presentation" to a reader who will evaluate it or use it in another
way. Proofreading checks the hard copy (printed version) of your document for:
- Tangled sentences,
- Spelling errors that spell check won't catch (like their for there), and
- Grammatical problem areas that are patterns for you (like run-on sentences
or sentence fragments).
Writers may ask, "What's so important about proofreading my writing?"
After all, most errors and mistakes that we catch during proofreading are small,
and are often barely noticeable. Readers will still be able to understand the
main idea of a piece of writing, even if the writing isn't absolutely perfect
in every small detail, right?
Wrong! Not only is proofreading is one of the key ways that writers show respect
for their readers and authority in their voices, but poor proofreading really
can lead to confusion for your readers!
Respect for Readers: When readers sit down to read your writing, they
spend their valuable time on you and they consider your thinking. Careful proofreading
tells your readers that you respect their time, and that it will be time well
spent.
If your readers suspect that you haven't invested much time in your writing,
they may feel that your writing doesn't deserve much of their time either. After
all, readers may assume, if the writer hasn't taken the time to proofread, s/he
probably hasn't taken much time in other aspects of her writing either!
In addition, your readers have lives of their own, too. Many instructors squeeze
in essay reading between other tasks such as classes, meetings, keeping a home,
and taking care of family members. Imagine that your teacher has been reading
student essays for three hours and now has to take time out halfway through
your essay to fix some spaghetti and salad for dinner. When the dinner is over
and the dishes are cleared, will he or she remember anything positive from your
essay before beginning to read again? Or, will it be so full of errors that
your teacher will begin rereading it with a disappointed sense that you didn't
care enough about your writing to proofread it carefully?
Authority in Voice: Imagine that you pick up the morning newspaper and
begin reading the lead story. Perhaps a major national event has taken place,
and you are eager to learn the details of that event. In the first line of the
news story, you notice several misspellings. In the second sentence, you see
that the journalist has used the word for where he should have written four.
Do you keep reading this news story, or do you look for the information elsewhere?
You probably would look elsewhere, because the writer's failure to proofread
his story has weakened the authority of his voice. In other words, you can't
trust him! If he has not even taken the time to proofread his writing, you can
assume fairly that he also may have neglected to research his article well.
You can assume that if a writer's final draft contains misspellings, it may
contain some misinformation as well.
The Limitations of Spell-Checking Programs
Proofreading usually comes after using a computer's grammar- and spell-checking
programs. While spell-checkers and grammar checkers can be useful for catching
glaring mistakes, they regularly fail to pick up other errors, especially mistaken
and forgotten words. Look at these examples of errors that spell-check programs
will always miss:
1. After going the store, Mary walked outside to her car.
2. Mom wasn't to happy when I lead the wet dog into the kitchen.
In the first example, the writer has left out the preposition to before the
store. Spell-checkers won't catch missed words, and so the only way to find
this kind of mistake is to proofread.
In the second example above, the writer has mistakenly used the word to where
too is needed. Also, a careful proofreader will notice that lead ought to be
led. Both lead and led are words, but they have different meanings and only
one of them works in this sentence. And since to, too, lead and led are all
correctly spelled words, a spell-checker won't mark any of them as errors.
Here's an interesting thought to consider. The first time that you read sentences
1 & 2 above, did you think that they were ok? Did you read the first one
as "After going to the store, Mary walked outside to her car."? If
you did, you're not alone. A lot of people mentally insert words into a text
even when the writer forgot or neglected to put them there. That's why we can
understand even poorly written texts: our experience with English allows us
to figure out meanings and insert corrections.
But, it is our ability to insert words that aren't on the page that most often
trips up student writers. Students often proofread their essays, but when the
instructor returns the essays, the students are shocked at the number of typographical
errors that the teacher saw. What happened? Did the students really proofread?
Most likely, what happened was that the students unconsciously corrected the
errors or filled in missing words while proofreading, but forgot to make the
changes on the actual essay. The goal of this lesson is to help you make your
"corrective" proofreading a more conscious process.
The following hints for proofreading will help you to make those actual changes
and to avoid misunderstanding with your instructors and other readers.
Proofreading Methods
Just as each writer finds his or her own way to brainstorm and start a piece
of writing, each writer must find his or her own method of proofreading. Here
are some very useful techniques that you can try as you look for your own most
effective proofreading method:
- Read your work aloud: When we read silently to ourselves, we often
tend to read what we want to have written, rather than what we have actually
written. When you read your work aloud, you are more likely to notice missing
or mistaken words. Often, it is much easier to hear little mistakes than it
is to see them. Another way to think about reading aloud is in terms of your
senses. When you read silently, you use the sense of eyesight. But if you
read aloud, you add the senses of speech and hearing. With added sensory perception
to your proofreading, you're more likely to catch errors or odd sounding sentences.
- Have a friend read your work aloud to you while you look at your essay:
Since your friends will be less familiar with your writing than you are,
they will be less likely to read what you meant to write, and will read what
you actually wrote instead. This can be a valuable way for you to hear the
mistakes that your readers will notice. Again, thinking about sensory perception,
when you add your friend's speech, eyesight, and hearing to your own eyesight
for proofreading, you have a total of four senses attending to your essay's
presentation.
- Come back to your writing after being away from it for a few days:
Try to schedule your writing process so that you have a few days before an
assignment is due. Then, leave your draft untouched. You'll become a bit less
familiar with the content and gain a fresh perspective. When you come back
to your writing, you'll often notice little mistakes that you overlooked during
the first stages of writing.
- Read your sentences in reverse order: In other words, read your last
sentence first, and then the sentence before that, and so on until you finally
read your essay's first sentence. By reading your sentences in reverse order,
you won't get caught-up in the flow of your ideas, and will instead be forced
to pay attention to each individual sentence. This is one great way of slowing
down and focusing your eye on the small details of your writing. For this
strategy, use a piece of paper to cover the top of your writing and move it
upwards from the bottom as you finish proofing each sentence.
- Proofread a printed version of your essay: More and more writers
compose, revise, edit and proofread their writing on a computer, printing
out only the final draft at the end of the writing process. Try printing out
an edited draft of your writing, and then proofreading the hard copy. If you
are used to looking at your work on a computer screen, the change to looking
at your writing on paper can "refresh" your focus.
- Keep a proofreading log: Most writers, even practiced and published
writers, have certain grammatical weaknesses that they will encounter over
and over again. If you keep a record of which errors you make most often,
you can be sure to look for those kinds of mistakes in all of your writing.
For instance, a proofreading log might look something like this:
· I confuse here and hear.
· I use too many unnecessary commas.
· I forget to use apostrophes to show possession.
The writer who keeps this list will be able to look especially hard for these
three types of errors in his or her writing. Look over some of your recent
writing, and design your own proofreading log. Keep it handy next time you
proofread and see whether this strategy helps you.
Caution: Be sure to mark the hard copy with all of your changes and then
to type those changes into your saved draft. Print a final "presentation"
draft for handing in to your instructor.
Summary
Proofreading is an important step that all writers must take near the end of
the writing process. By reading aloud, listening to someone else read your writing,
reading sentences in reverse order, keeping a proofreading log, and using other
proofreading techniques, a writer can be sure to catch small mistakes that would
otherwise distract and annoy readers.
  
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