Tips for perfect proofreading

It’s turned into proofing week here at the Emphasis blog. In this final part, we aim to finish turning you into mistake-spotting machines.

How

Stocking up on red pens is just the beginning. Follow these tips to ensure you always prove your proofreading prowess.

• Proofread in the morning if you can – if you’re tired, you’re more likely to miss things.

• Print documents off to proofread – it’s much more effective than trying to do it onscreen.

• Proofread at least twice – once for sense, once for technical accuracy.

• Read backwards for typos so you’re not distracted by the meaning of the words.

• Use a blank sheet of paper to cover material not yet proofed and point to each word as you go.

What

Look out for:

• clusters of mistakes: the elation of spotting one may lead you to miss the one right next to it

• repetition of words – particularly split over two lines

• commonly mixed up words, eg there and their, or principle and principal

• little words – big words draw the eye

• brackets and speech marks – is the second one in the right place?

And finally

Here are a few clarifying pointers – inspired by the challenge – worth raising:

• It’s very easy to overlook titles, subtitles and headings, or subject lines in email (particularly as they won’t be spellchecked). Don’t! There was a howler in this one.

• Depending on your company’s style, you may not need to put a comma after the salutation and sign off in letters and emails. If you do use them, be consistent – ie use them after both

• ‘Its’ only needs an apostrophe when it’s short for ‘it is’ or ‘it has’. When it shows possession, it doesn’t have one.

• If you’re having trouble placing an apostrophe in a less-than-familiar construction (eg each other’s work), just reverse it like so: the work of each other (not others). So here it needs to go after the r.

• You’d only put a full stop – or any other punctuation – inside a bracket if the brackets contain a full sentence. If they contain an aside, the punctuation will be outside. For example:

From now on, let’s make sure that nothing is sent out without first being proofread (this includes email).

Happy proofing!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2011 at 9:28 am and is filed under Proofreading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.