4 Good Tips When Proofreading Your Own Work

One of the surest ways to ensure that your document is free from errors, is to use a professional proofreading service. When you recruit an expert to provide proofreading services for your university work, novel, or journal article, you can rest assured that they will spot all of the embarrassing errors that you may have made.

However, ordering a proofreading service is not the most cost-effective way to ensure that your written work is in a pristine and presentable condition when it comes to publishing it. Rather than using proofreading services, if you check your own work, this can save you the expense and, if you do it carefully, yield the required results.

Proofreading your own work, though, is not a simple task. This is the reason why professional proofreaders train for many years, as it enables them to develop the complex skills needed to do the job efficiently and effectively. Nevertheless, if you are eager to get stuck in to the proofreading process, this article offers 4 quick tips that will help you improve the presentation of your work.

 

1. Use a good spellchecker

Using a high-quality spellchecker is the first crucial tip that you need to follow if you decide to proofread your own work. Many good spellcheckers are freely available, ranging from the array of software solutions built into programs like Microsoft Word ,to other online options such as Grammarly. Be sure to run through your work with a spellchecker both before you start proofreading and after completion.

 

2. Begin only after finishing your final draft

This is an often-overlooked point, but it is one of the most important ways to improve the speed and quality of your proofreading process. If you start proofreading your work before you have finalised it, then you are likely to need to make further changes even after you have finished the first round of proofing. This makes the process unnecessarily lengthy, meaning that you should begin proofreading only after finishing your final draft.

 

3. Check carefully for homonyms

Spellcheckers are an indispensable tool when proofreading your work, as noted in the first tip given in this article. However, spellcheckers overlook many issues that are obvious to the human eye, one of which is the so-called “homonym error”. A homonym is a word that has a similar pronunciation to another word but a different meaning and spelling (e.g., “bear” and “bare”), and – as you can check right now – your spellchecking software will reliably fail when it comes to spotting homonym errors. For this reason, you need to check your work carefully for homonyms.

 

4. Aim for consistency

A major part of a proofreader’s job, but one that’s often overlooked even by many professionals, is to ensure that all aspects of a manuscript are consistent. This ranges from consistency in spelling and grammar to consistency in capitalisation, numbering, punctuation, and many other areas. Therefore, before you finish proofreading, undertake a systematic check for any areas where consistency is desirable (e.g., Are headings all in title case? Does section numbering skip any numbers? And so on).