If I had to choose one proofreading tip to share
In past posts on here, I’ve shared my very best writing advice and my top tip for editing, so to complete the series, it would be natural to share my number-one proofreading tip. Something that can help you check emails, newsletters, web copy, proposals, social posts, anything really that you’re sharing online or in print.
However, I stalled on sharing something because I couldn’t settle on one piece of proofreading advice, there are so many to offer.
The big piece, of course, would be to not proofread things yourself but to find a fresh pair of eyes from a professional proofreader (hi, it’s me). But, I specifically wanted to write these three ‘top tip’ posts to give some quick free insight and advice for the times when you need to do it yourself.
And if you are doing it yourself, you’ll most likely be proofediting rather than proofreading. Proofediting is when you’ve edited your text already, and things are in pretty good shape, but you know there may still be a bit of work to do, both in checking for anything that needs correcting and reading through for overall flow.
I’ll pause here and tell you that I’ve just deleted 727 words from this post.1 I was going to cheat a little (okay, a lot) with the ‘one top tip’. Because the key with proofreading (whether for half a page or hundreds of thousands of words) is to apply multiple techniques; to put the text through as many different processes as possible to help see things anew. The more methods you find to look at your words in a different way, the better2. So, when Monday-evening me wrote a quick draft of this post it contained thirteen different slices of advice (and those were just the headings!). But now Friday-morning me is here, and it’s clear that thirteen is quite a few more than one.
So, if I had to pick one (which, by my own made-up constraints, I do), I’d offer you this, my favourite-ever proofreading friend:
Read it aloud.
Ideally, in two different ways (not simultaneously obvs):
Speak the words out to yourself; hear how they sound; notice any places you trip up or anything that jumps out as looking or sounding ‘wrong’. This also helps with final editing and fine-tuning the rhythm of the words. If you usually use a screen reader, try selecting a different voice; or ask someone else to read it back to you.
Get your computer to read it to you (using the text-to-speech feature). This is particularly helpful for catching the the things that our brains are usually capable of seamlessly autocorrecting for us, such as common typos like ‘form’ when you mean ‘from’ and any accidental repetition, like the double ‘the’ near the beginning of this sentence. It will also reveal places where e.g. perhaps you’ve used an l (lowercase L) when it should be an uppercase I (something that is remarkably common given how far apart L and i are from each other on the keyboard).
I hope this helps next time you need to check through some wording 💖
Disclaimer: Inevitably when writing anything that shouts about proofreading, Muphry’s Law will likely apply:
Muphry's Law is the editorial application of the better-known Murphy's Law. Muphry's Law dictates that (a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; (d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.
— John Bangsund writing in the Society of Editors Newsletter, March 1992
Saved for later.
