HOW TO PROOFREAD YOUR OWN WRITING
It’s finals week or thesis season, all your friends are busy with their own work, and you are too broke to pay anyone to proofread your work, but the idea of going through the paper you just spent 16 hours/a whole week/two months on makes you want to scream. Proofreading your own text is not ideal, and reading through something you spent forever working on can be tedious, but proofreading can easily be broken down into baby steps. Here are some tips on how to make proofreading your own paper a little more bearable.
Sleep on it. Technically you don’t have to, but it’s good to put distance between yourself and your text. Even a ten minute break will make a difference!
Check the formatting. This is a tiny but important thing, and I tend to forget it if I leave it to the end. Going through the motions of formatting can also put you in the editing mindset, so it might be a good place to start if you’re dreading the whole process.
Make use of your word processor’s spell check & proofing tools. They won’t catch everything, but they will weed out the majority of your typos.
Now the real work begins!
Print out your paper, or if you can’t, open it on another device, such as an iPad or a Kindle. It will work better than re-reading it on the same screen that you wrote it on. Take a coloured pencil and start working through your text. You can correct your original document as you go – I prefer going section by section.
Start with the introduction and conclusion. You probably wrote these the last, and you were probably very tired already. You can expect your readers to pay the most attention to these sections. They are likely to have at least a few typos, so don’t leave them to the end of the proofreading process, give them the full attention they need.
Read out loud. This will help you catch run-on sentences and awkward wording. It’s fine to do minor editing at this point, but if you change the sentence structure, double-check its immediate context too.
Know your weakness. If you know there’s a word you often misspell, do a search for it in your document and replace if needed.
Don’t forget the footnotes and the bibliography. Quickly go over them at least once.
Double-check the formatting and you’re all done!
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