Dear customers! We are glad to welcome you at our service, we offer all kinds of writing and also some additional services. One of such additional services, which we can help you with is proofreading. Proofreading is examining the text carefully in order to find and correct typographical errors and different kinds of mistakes: style, grammar, and spelling. Proofreading is an acquired skill, not an inborn ability. Here are some tips for those who want to know how to proofread.
Before you proofread your own text make sure you’ve revised the larger aspects of the text. Don’t hurry to make corrections at the word and sentence level if you still need to work on the sense, organization, focus, and development of the whole paper, its sections, or paragraphs. It would also help if you leave your text aside for a while (30 minutes, few days, or a week) between writing and proofreading. It should help you to see mistakes easier. We also recommend you to eliminate unnecessary words from the paper before looking for mistakes. Try to write clear, concise and direct sentences. Remember your last papers and mistakes you’ve made, think of past comments of your professor. Pay special attention to your weak points. It would help if you list of mistakes you need to watch for.
Be careful with your brain. Make sure you read what is actually written on the page, not what you think is written. (It is very difficult to acquire this sub-skill, especially if you have written what you are reading). Don’t be lazy, proofread more than once. It is better to work with someone else. When you read, do it very slowly, if possible, read out loud. Do not hurry, read one word at a time.When you proofread it is better to work with the print text, not computer screen. (But don’t forget to use computer functions that help to find some kinds of mistakes). Another tip for proofreaders is to read out loud. This is especially useful for spotting run-on sentences, but you will also hear many other problems that you may not notice when reading silently. You may use a blank sheet of paper for covering up the lines below the one you are reading. This trick doesn’t let you skip ahead of possible mistakes. The search function of the computer may help you to find mistakes you are likely to make. For example, search for “it”, if you often confuse “its” and “it’s;” for opening quote marks if you are likely to leave out the closing ones. If you know that you are not attentive and tend to make many mistakes, it is better to check separately the text for each kind of error, starting from the most important ones. Choose different techniques according to the kind of mistake you are looking for. For example, for checking for fragments read through (backwards, sentence by sentence); to make sure that subjects and verbs agree read the text again (forward). You can end with a spelling check; you can either use computer spelling checker or read the whole text backwards word by word. But be careful, a spelling checker will not catch mistakes with homonyms (like, “they’re,” “there”, “their”) or possible typos (e.g. “he” for “the”).
Most written errors are made unconsciously. There are two main sources of unconscious error, they are:
- Faulty information from your kinesthetic memory. If there are some words that you have always misspelled, there is a great possibility that you will unthinkingly misspell them again.
- A split second of inattention. Human’s mind works far faster than hands, which write or type.
Our unconscious nature makes proofreading so difficult. When you proofread your own text, you automatically read what you were writing, not what is really written. You must doubt every word if you want to catch every mistake. One more for deliberately slowing down is: when you read normally, you see only the first and last few letters. You need to “fix your eyes” on the print three or four times per line, or even less. The average reader with one fixation can take in six letters accurately. So, you have to fix eyes on almost every single word and do it even twice in longer words, in order to proofread accurately.
Professional editors proofread ten times. Publishing houses have teams of proofreaders to work in pairs, out loud. But still errors occur. It is twice as hard to find mistakes in your own paper as in someone else’s! That is why we offer you such a service as proofreading. We can guarantee that after our professional proofreading you professor won’t be able to find a single mistake. If you want your paper to be perfect, you need someone’s help to proofread it. If you turn to our specialists, you will never regret it.
