Five strategies for nearly purfect proofreading

1. Unless you’ve got a tight deadline, give yourself some time between finishing up a final draft and proofreading it. When you print out a draft and proof it promptly after you finished work on it, your eyes aren’t as likely to see what is on the page as they will be when there is some distance between composing and proofing.
2. Use a printout for proofreading instead of proofreading on a computer monitor. Especially when a document is longer than a single screen and requires scrolling, the scrolling jumps leave a gap in narrative continuity, and errors can slip in that you might catch on a printed version. Also, the growth in the amount of time we spend skimming through Web pages and e-mail brings with it a tendency to move just as quickly when we’re proofreading.
3. Read the document aloud (in a whisper if you share an office and don’t want to distract co-workers). As with all proofreading strategies, the overarching goal is to slow yourself down so you aren’t flying through text too quickly to pick up omissions, repetitions and well-camouflaged errors—especially in words or phrases that occur so frequently in our work that we don’t really read all of them once we see where a word or phrase is headed.
4. After you’ve proofed through a document from start to finish, go back through it backwards. Not word-by-word backwards, but sentence-by-sentence backwards.
5. The best strategy of all is to get a colleague (or two or three if possible) to proof through the document after you’ve gone through it. Fresh eyes are especially valuable if you’ve got a document, which uses lengthy titles frequently. If, for example, your document frequently refers to “USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service’s East National Technology Support Center,” your reading rate is going to accelerate after you’ve seen that title a few dozen times, and you’ll be unwittingly flying through it so fast you won’t notice if you somewhere have “Natural” and “National” in the wrong locations.

Posted March 5, 2008 04:13 PM

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