Question

List four things to look for when you're proofreading

Answer 1

Spelling. Word choice. Consistency. Style. 

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.