Proofreading Tips for Self-Publishing

Self-publishing a book is a really difficult task, even with the availability of book proofreading services UK. No matter how many times you check over your manuscript, you’ll be amazed at the number of errors that can sneak in. This makes editing and proofreading services vital for efficient and high-quality work as an author.

If you can’t use editing and proofreading services for your next book, you can still ease the process of self-publishing by considering a few tips. This article focuses on proofreading tips you can apply to ensure that everything you’ve written – from the cover to the copyright and title pages – is presented in the best possible way.   

 

1. Know your strengths

If you know what you’re good at as a writer, you’ll also have a clear sense of your weaknesses. If you repeatedly make the same errors, being aware of them can help you to avoid them in the future.

 

2. Read your writing out loud

Reading aloud gives your ears a chance to catch the mistakes that your eyes may miss. Using freely available text-to-speech programs can also help in this area.

 

Image: Reading aloud is an important proofreading tip for self-publishing

3. Start with a style guide

You should always begin your writing journey by choosing a style guide and sticking close to it. Whenever you come across a word or phrase that you’re not sure how to write, you can consult your style guide for a clear solution.

 

4. Use a spellchecker

You can’t rely on a spellchecker alone to ensure you have high-quality writing. However, as a tool to use alongside other tools (such as text-to-speech software or book proofreading services UK), spellcheckers are invaluable.

 

5. Devote special attention to punctuation

Punctuation is a pivotal aspect of writing that deserves careful attention during proofreading, but it is often overlooked today. Before you begin proofreading, open up a grammar book and review for yourself the fundamental rules of punctuation.

 

Image: You should carefully check semi-colons and other punctuation marks

6. Vary your sentence lengths

This is more of an editing point than a proofreading point, but when you’re self-publishing, you can also focus on revising your sentence lengths for greater impact and emphasis while proofreading.

 

7. Don’t proofread forever

It’s important to remember that proofreading is just a phase in the self-publishing process. At some point, it needs to come to an end, and if possible, you can use professional services to get through the phase reasonably quickly.

 

Image: Try to proofread well but also efficiently!

8. Work your muscles

Just as professional athletes and musicians practice every day to keep up their fitness, you should also seek out opportunities to maintain your muscles for editing and proofreading. One way to do this is to read excellent writing, which will expose you to new and potentially inspiring ways to recast your old sentences.

Practical Processes in Proofreading

A growing number of people today are paying for editing and proofreading services. However, very few people know about the practical processes involved in professional proofreading and editing.

While proofreading and editing services are affordable for many students, academics, and businesses, the reason they are often priced higher than newcomers would think is due to the complexity of the tasks involved in preparing a manuscript for publication.

For example, the time-consuming nature of proofreading and editing partly account for the pricing of these services. Another contributing factor is the educational background of the proofreader.

An especially important factor that feeds into the pricing of these services, as mentioned above, is the issue of the processes involved. In this article, then, some of these processes are described to help you better understand what proofreading and editing actually involve.

 

1. On-screen editing with paper proofreading

Professional editors and proofreaders know all about the practice of editing using a computer screen and then using a hardcopy for proofreading.

For complicated reasons, our brains and eyes simply do not notice words and letters on computer screens particularly well.

By contrast, when errors are printed onto a page, they seem to jump up and become immediately obvious, even to the untrained eye. This is one of the reasons why you often find spelling errors in many printed books.

For this reason, once the more complicated process of editing has been completed on screen, professional proofreaders print out the document and work on it on paper.

 

2. Follow a one-at-a-time mindset

A professional editor or proofreader knows that it is futile to try to find and solve every problem in a manuscript in one pass. This is because it is difficult for us to keep track of an extensive list of proofreading and editing issues and categories.

For this reason, professionals go through a manuscript on several passes, each time looking for a specific issue (e.g., punctuation on the first pass, wordiness on the second pass, and style on the third).

When you use this approach, you can keep your mind focused as a proofreader or editor. Conversely, if you try to find every single error at the same time, there is a high likelihood that you will miss some errors.

 

3. Work with a style guide from the beginning

Rather than writing your document and then consulting a style guide to fix it once it’s finished, you can save a lot of time by working with a style guide from the beginning. Professional proofreaders and editors commonly follow this process of working with a style guide from the outset.

 

4. Don’t use full justification

If you decide to proofread and edit your manuscript using a computer monitor and a word processor, you should avoid using full justification for your text.

The reason why it is a common practice among professional editors and proofreaders to avoid fully justified text is because this makes it harder to find specific types of errors (e.g., extra spaces).

 

5. Syllable-level rather than word-level checking

When an untrained proofreader checks a sentence, they tend to read it through word by word. By contrast, the process that a professional adopts involves syllable by syllable checking.

The reason for this is that for longer words, which may contain three or four syllables, your eyes will tend to skip over (or compress) each of the syllables. This makes it difficult to spot errors that may occur in the middle of the word.  

Is Proofreading Just About Correcting Spelling Errors?

Professional proofreading services are now becoming increasingly in-demand, but there are still misconceptions about what professional proofreading actually involves. In particular, many potential users of proofreading services are unclear about whether proofreading simply involves the correction of spelling errors, which is a task that most automated spell checkers can easily do.

Different from editing, proofreading is concerned with fixing typographical, spelling, grammar, and other basic errors in a piece of writing. While editing entails making every correction that would improve a document (e.g., clarity, structure, format, tone, word choice, and so on), professional proofreading only involves making a restricted set of corrections and improvements.

 

Image: Editing and proofreading aren’t the same thing!

The fact that proofreading a document is much simpler compared to editing it is one of the reasons why the activity of proofreading is often viewed as a straightforward one. However, proofreading is far from simple, and as the above definition suggests, it is not just concerned with the correction of spelling errors. Indeed, proofreading spans many smaller tasks, many of which overlap with editing.

When a document is ready to be submitted for professional proofreading services, it is important to recognise that it should already have been edited. This means that the content in the document should be well structured, well written, and readable. At this point, it is the job of the proofreader to bring the final manuscript to a place where it could be published. This is achieved by ironing out grammatical, spelling, formatting, and typographical errors, and it may also involve ensuring that the document conforms to a specific style guide.

 

Image: Proofreading always comes after editing

The extent of the proofreading service you receive will also depend to a significant degree on the service provider or freelancer that you choose to work with. The reason for this is that the service descriptions offered by the available service providers and freelancers often differ on key points. For example, newer proofreaders may focus on issues such as the structure of your document, whereas traditional proofreaders may be limited in the number and type of revisions that they make.

Altogether, despite the fact that proofreading is less comprehensive compared to editing, it is a key step in the preparation of any manuscript that is intended to be read by others. In almost all cases, proofreading involves more than correcting spelling errors.Perhaps the best way of thinking about what proofreading involves is that it is a process that will completely revise any confusing, unprofessional, or inconsistent aspects of your writing.

How to Fix a Bad Sentence

There are many reasons why a sentence may be a bad one. It may be too wordy, it may not be very informative or coherent, it may even be boring or not engaging.

Whatever the reasons are why you think a given sentence may be good or bad, it’s always worth having a second pair of eyes check over your writing. This is the reason why proofreading services are becoming increasingly popular today.

Using a proofreading service can be a quick way to fix a bad sentence, but it also requires a small investment of time and money. For this reason, this article covers a few tips and rules of thumb that can help you troubleshoot and correct any poorly written sentences you may have.

 

1. Check for errors and double words

The clearest way a sentence can be a ‘bad’ sentence is when it contains an error, such as a double word. Your spell checker will usually catch double words and blatant mistakes for you, but proofreading services are also very helpful if you need something more comprehensive than an automated spell checker.

 

2. Rearrange your sentences

Some sentences strike the reader as ‘bad’ or inappropriate because they don’t fit the context. Therefore, if the flow or coherence of your writing is undermined by poorly organised sentences, switching their order can be a good solution.

For example, when you re-read your paragraph, you may find that the paragraph’s topic sentence is concealed at the end or the middle. This is an example of a poor sentence due to suboptimal placement, and so rearranging the sentence (i.e., moving it to the beginning) can make it a good one.

 

3. Use interesting words

After writing for long enough, some writers eventually become stuck in a rut, where they feel like they are using the same 15 words all over the place.

If this happens, it can damage your sentences by failing to engage the reader. In the context of web content writing, for example, this can be a catastrophe, given the importance of engagement.

To solve this, you can pick up a thesaurus, find some words that are similar to the ones you regularly use, and make a concentrated effort to use those in the future.

 

4. Strive for cohesion at the paragraph level

Some readers may consider a sentence ‘bad’ if it does not link in a clear way to the previous sentence. If this problem is plaguing your sentences, you can use so-called ‘cohesion words’ as a reasonable solution.

For example, if your sentence describes a consequence of an action described in the preceding sentence, the phrase ‘Due to this’ can be used to show this connection clearly. Another reasonable phrase that could be used is ‘As a result.’