Spelling.
Word choice. Consistency. Style. <span>
When you proofread (which is different from editing, by the
way), you’ll really just be going over your writing for small mistakes/typos
that may have slipped by you earlier in the writing process. Proofreading can
be considered a type of “polishing up,” if you will, of a document before it is
finalized. You’ll be on the lookout for little errors such as spelling errors
and misused words/word choice—words that spell check may have missed because
spell check generally only catches misspelled words, not correctly spelled
words used incorrectly such as “their” when “there” should have been used or
“two” when “too” should have been used.
Additionally, when we are writing/typing, typically, our
minds work more quickly than do our fingers. Thus, our fingers may miss words
we intended for them to type. Too, our minds are such powerful things, if we
read over our work too soon after typing, we’ll read our writing as we intended
for it to be written, not as it actually is.
Other things to look out for are consistency and style. When
looking for consistency, it is important to make sure you are using the correct
verb tense throughout because when speaking, we tend to switch tense for
effect, and it is easy to let our speaking mannerisms find their way into what
we are writing.
On the topic of that, many of us often use clichés and
figurative language when speaking, and this is something for which to be on the
lookout when proofreading because we tend to speak figuratively in our daily
lives so much so that when writing, we don’t even know we are doing it, and in
academic writing, it is always best to be as literal as possible.</span>
