Should you Use Software for Proofreading?

Whether you’re writing a document as a student, academic, lecturer, content creator, businessperson, lawyer, sports enthusiast, or – for that matter – anything else, spelling and grammar mistakes are inevitable.

Professional proofreading plays an important role in the preparation of all documents, however big or small, and this is one of the reasons why professional proofreading services are becoming increasingly popular today. After all, given the difficulties that all writers have in producing error-free documents, it is understandable that professional proofreading services are in high demand. 

While professional proofreading is one option that you need to consider, you may not always have the budget, the time, or the inclination to work with experts in the field. Also, it’s often the case that the document you’re preparing is too small to be worth sending to a proofreader (e.g., an email).

With all this in mind, the option of using software to assist in proofreading is something that cannot be overlooked. There are many excellent proofreading tools available online, both for free and paid, and – whether you are working with a professional or not – it is strongly recommended that you exploit these.

Having established that you should always be using software to improve your documents, the purpose of the rest of this article is to examine the pros and cons of two well-known pieces of writing software: Grammarly and ProWritingAid.

 

Grammarly

Grammarly is both a free and paid spellchecking tool to help with proofreading, style, and readability in your mission-critical documents. It is powered by artificial intelligence, it is available on all devices, and it even offers a built-in plagiarism detector, which is perfect for academic writing.

An important benefit of using Grammarly is that it helps you to catch basic spelling and grammar errors that you might otherwise overlook. Alongside this, the software enables you to maintain a consistent tone and writing style throughout your document, which your readers will definitely appreciate.

On the positive side, Grammarly is user-friendly and, in the opinion of almost all experienced proofreaders, is an indispensable tool. One of the most effect

ive uses of Grammarly is to integrate it into your web browser (e.g., Google Chrome), which is great when editing WordPress posts or writing emails.

On the negative side, many professional writers find that the paid version of Grammarly leaves a lot to be desired. The suggestions that the Grammarly AI system makes are not always on point, and, in many cases, they are incorrect. However, when used by proofreaders as a tool – not as a replacement – this piece of software is extremely valuable.

 

ProWritingAid

Compared to Grammarly’s more restricted focus on grammar and punctuation, ProWritingAid is a comprehensive tool that focuses on content style, structure, and syntax.

While Grammarly is great for getting rid of errors in short blog posts, ProWritingAid is better suited for extended pieces of writing where in-depth explanations for suggestions are needed.

Similar to Grammarly, one of the most powerful features of ProWritingAid is its ability to integrate with Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Google Chrome.

Broadly speaking, ProWritingAid shines the most when it is used as a style-checker rather than a spellchecker. For this reason, professional writers and proofreaders often use both ProWritingAid and Grammarly alongside one another, with the two tools nicely complementing each other.  

Strengths and Weaknesses of Self-Publishing

Book proofreading services UK, as well as editing and proofreading services, can play an essential role in helping you to get your book published. As is well-known, many of the world’s most notable fiction and non-fiction authors, including the author of the famous Harry Potter series, routinely make use of professional editing and proofreading services.

Once you have your edited and proofread book in your hands, however, the process of becoming a book author is not yet finished. In particular, you need to decide how to publish your book and make it available for the general public to purchase, read, and enjoy. Here, there are two choices:

·         Self-publishing

·         Traditional publishing

Traditional publishing is well-known to be a difficult area to enter, and this is especially true for unpublished authors. That’s to say, if you haven’t yet secured a book agent, and if you’ve never published a book before (whether with a traditional publishing house or via the self-publishing route), traditional publishing is not always the best option.

This article is aimed at new authors who are debating which route to take: self-publishing or traditional publishing. Assuming that you’re now in a position to publish your professionally edited and enhanced by book proofreading services, this article presents the strengths and weaknesses of self-publishing to help you decide whether it’s a good route of choice, for you.

 

Strengths of self-publishing

1. Independence

When authors work with traditional publishing houses, they invariably lose creative control over their work. For example, publishers typically reserve the right to choose a title for the book, the marketing angle, and the cover art, as well as to have their in-house editors chop it up and rearrange it in any way they see fit.

Of course, these are all highly significant aspects of your book that you yourself may want to control. For this reason, the independence that comes with self-publishing your book through, for example, Amazon may be much-welcomed. It can empower you to take control of these key aspects of your book, ensuring that your work is not manhandled by a publisher.

 

2. Higher royalties

After a traditional publishing house has invested a sizeable sum of money in editing services and, marketing, in selling your book, they need to make that money somehow. This is usually done in the form of renting authors only between 5% and 25% of the funds earned from the sales of the book.

However, if you opt for the self-publishing route, you can fetch royalties as high as 70%. As a case in point, if you sell your book on Amazon between 2.99 USD or 9.99 USD, you can receive a royalty of 70%, with Amazon taking a cut of 30%. This is significantly lower than the 80% cut your publisher might end up taking.

 

Weaknesses of self-publishing

1. You have to do everything

When publishers sign you onto a contract, they give you access to professional editors, marketers, cover designers, and typesetters. However, if you opt for self-publishing, you’ll have to do all of this yourself or hire freelancers to work with. The learning curve can be steep, as with any new skill.

 

2. Print distribution difficulties

If you decide to self-publish your book, especially as a brand-new author with no track record, you’re likely to have a difficult time getting the print versions of your book into bookstores. By contrast, the sales teams within traditional publishing houses usually have strong links with bookstores, and so that serves as a much more direct path into print distribution.

Processes to Improve Your Proofreading

People are always alarmed to find out how difficult it is to spot common proofreading mistakes. Ultimately, the human brain isn’t wired up to spot tiny, abstract details like missing words, incorrectly written words, and other similar errors; this is the reason why professional proofreading services are in such high demand today.

If you can’t afford a proofreading service for your latest publication, or if you would simply like to try your hand at this difficult task, then this article will be of benefit. Over the next few paragraphs, this article draws attention to three of the practical processes you can apply during your next proofreading session to greatly improve your accuracy, effectiveness, and speed.

 

1. Go slowly to save time

This is somewhat paradoxical – how does proofreading slowly save you time?

Well, the answer is simple. You save time by slowly proofreading your work because this saves you from having to go back at a later time and correct all the errors you missed by rushing.

When you receive a professional proofreading service, one of the tried-and-tested methods that your experienced proofreader will apply is to check through each sentence slowly and methodically. This allows them to see every word, every syllable, and every phrase, ensuring it’s digested properly.

Also, going slowly – despite being difficult and requiring discipline – provides an opportunity to check, double-check, and triple-check the document.

 

Image: In proofreading, slow but steady wins the race

2. Move through the text problem by problem

When you proofread your work, proceeding through it (slowly and methodically) sentence by sentence, it’s important not to try to find every single problem in only one pass through. If you try to fix everything in one go, you’ll end up doing a half-baked job.

Instead, if you check through your document several times, and each time focus only on a single type of issue (e.g., punctuation on one pass, spelling on another pass, and so on), you can stay focused and significantly reduce your rate of errors.

 

Image: While proofreading, focus on each problem category separately

3. Check footnotes separately

Many people think that because footnotes are usually “boring” to read (i.e., they typically contain only reference information intended for hardcore scholars), it’s acceptable not to check them as rigorously as you would the other parts of your document (e.g., your scientific abstract or your conclusion).

This is a serious mistake, however. As a matter of fact, if you don’t use proofreading services to check that your footnotes are written in good English (which is actually a tremendous time-saver!), you should devote specific time to checking them and only them.

When you perform your separate footnote check, be sure to increase the font size because footnotes are usually very small (remember to switch the font size back, though). This will ensure that when the proofreading process is finished, every part of your document is publication-ready.

 

Image: Footnotes need love and attention, too!

Are Young People Better at Proofreading?

To proofread a document well, the quickest and most effective solution – but also the most expensive – is simply to use professional proofreading services.  

Short of recruiting trained and experienced experts in professional proofreading, though, what can you do to improve the quality of your writing or, for that matter, get better at proofreading?

Until quite recently, any answer to this question would have been highly subjective. That’s to say, every writer, proofreader, or editor would have had their own personal thoughts and judgments about what constituted the main skills a proofreader requires, to do a good job.

However, in 2015, an article published by M. A Shafto and P. B. Tchounwou in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health systematically examined questions relating to both professional proofreading and amateur proofreading, as well as differences in proofreading between young and older adults.

On the question of what skills a person should have in order to perform well as a proofreader, Shafto and Tchounwou’s article drew attention to the importance of stored knowledge, language processing, and attentional resources. At the same time, the authors stated:

In addition to being a practical skill, proofreading is also a complex cognitive function that relies on both core language processes and higher-level cognitive abilities related to attention and problem-solving... During proofreading, detecting and correcting errors relies on language comprehension and production.

On reading this, as well as the other scientific insights offered by Shafto and Tchounwou, one quickly begins to see how much value professional proofreading services offer to students, academics, and businesspeople.

Given the complexity of the skills required to proofread a document effectively, it becomes self-evident that making use of experts in professional proofreading comes with a high return on investment.

However, an important issue exposed by Shafto and Tchounwou – which is also implied by the complex skills required for good proofreading – is the possibility that young people are “better” at proofreading compared to old people. In fact, the authors addressed this directly in their study, reporting that – based on their experimental evidence – young people do indeed appear to be better proofreaders:

Older adults ... were impaired relative to young adults when proofreading grammar or meaning errors, especially for difficult passages. Additionally, older adults were [less effective] at detecting errors compared to correcting ... errors, in keeping with previous research.

With all this said, it’s worth emphasising that the participants in Shafto and Tchounwou’s study were not all professional proofreaders. Therefore, it is only possible to conclude on the basis of their findings that – among untrained and inexperienced proofreaders – young people tend to be better due to their greater attentional resources and their ability to concentrate for longer periods of time.

Critically, among experienced and trained proofreaders who provide professional proofreading services, there is no evidence that age has a significant impact on performance.

For this reason, when you order your next proofreading service, we do not recommend that you consider age as a factor when selecting your proofreader. Instead, there are far more consequential factors to take into account, including the proofreader’s level of expertise, experience, and dedication.