How To Proofread – Important Aspects
How To Proofread – Important Aspects
Writing itself is a difficult task either you are writing your thoughts or trying to convey some marketing message. You need to have some points jotted down and once you have your outline planned you can now easily work on those points. Nevertheless, you always have some new ideas popping up and you want to add them in your story as well.
In short, every writer knows this fact that writing is a tough task. And once you complete writing your story or article you need to review the entire part so that if there is any error you can easily solve it up. These errors can be grammatical or any spelling error. Some writers hire proofreaders or editors for their books and articles, you can do that as well but it’s quite expensive. And to avoid it you can always work on your own and edit the story or article anything you have written.
This step does sound easy and quick. But you need to be very careful once you start this process and you need to follow all the instructions that are usually given by an editor or someone senior to you. You have to be mindful of this process because once you jeopardize an amazing written article or the story of the novel for the stupid mistake then you are going to risk your identity as well as a reputation for future publication.
Once you started writing you need to get recognition from the outer world more, so they get to know who are you and what have you written. For that you need to make a Wikipedia page, to make yourself available for audience worldwide. On this page you can always add your book’s synopsis, reviews and sometimes plots for your targeted audience to get some taste of the book or the short story that you are writing.
Proofread, the task of reviewing texts closely to find mistakes, is often a problem of exhausted editors or frustrated readers, hurriedly and nonchalantly. When you do this half-heartedly, the whole process includes scanning the whole text without actually nullifying the errors. This is a natural trait for anyone who spent long hours trying to complete a well-written report and is too lazy to search for minor errors.
Then how you can make this process an easy and effective one for you? Below is the list of practical tips that will help you proofread when you face it next time?
Change the Font size
Something stresses tired eyes, but a lengthy text in a small font width. To avoid this stress, select everything and choose the bigger font size and larger font face so that it will be easier for you to read and do analyses.
Readout it loud!
It is a common practice for a writer to read its story loud. This might take up time, but it is indeed the easiest way for you to search for difficult words, run-on sentences (info), and mistake data regarding parallelism, word collection mistakes, the fluidity of sentences (info), and the overall tone. It could surprise you as to how many mistakes you could detect and correct by reading a text aloud compared to just scanning it with your eyes. Note that at this point your eyes are too tired. Use your ears to “listen” for errors this time around. It works miracles.
Now read silently and correct the errors.
Yes, in reading the sentences back, the mind works twice as much in processing each phrase. This is a foolproof way to check out spelling faults. However, not all people have the time to do so, so a good Spell checker can be very useful in this phase.
Read it all over again, but this time, you have a blank sheet shielding the portions of the text underneath the paragraph you are reading.
The readers who use this step they know how genius this trick is. This trick helps you to focus on the line you are reading and proofreading. By exposing the text you are reading will guide your mind to be focused on that line only, this could take some time, but once you are habitual of doing this trick, it will be easy for you to concentrate. If you are tired and you want to proofread some writing, it is advisable that you avoid doing it, because you will not be able to focus on what a writer wants to say.
And while we’re trying to trick your thoughts, go a step further and hear good music while you’re going along. Let us admit that revising is very boring and even if it needs no creativity, it requires you to focus intensely. A little music in the background can help to raise your brain’s stress while you still work on revision tasks.
