Proofreading Skills to ensure your Document is Error Free
Proofreading: It is difficult to produce an error-free document in your first draft. No matter how good a writer you are, you do need to run several revisions to ensure that there is no error in the paper. However, plenty of students don’t pay attention to the errors in the document and end up getting bad grades for their essays and assignments.
If you don’t want to lose crucial marks of your essays or assignments over silly spelling mistakes, you need to put in a lot of efforts. While proofreading the entire paper several times is the best way to keep your mistakes in check, there are several other ways to make your document error-free.
1.Keep the spell-checker on:
When you are writing your assignment on tools such as MS Word, it is easier to detect spelling mistakes as the tool highlights the spelling errors and punctuation errors in real time. If you can turn the spelling and grammar checker on, you won’t have to worry about identifying the silly spelling mistakes anymore.
Even though the spell checker on the document writing platforms often ignores certain grammatical and punctuation errors, it flags all the incorrect spellings effectively. Also, if you right-click on the highlighted word, it suggests you the right spelling of the word you intended to write. This is perhaps the easiest way to get rid of spelling errors in the paper.
2. Manual checking:
Proofreading the paper manually is the best way to identify and rectify errors in the paper. If you don’t feel confident about your proofreading abilities, you may need to develop the habit of reading. This will help you improve your vocabulary, as well as the right way of using the words in a sentence. Needless to say, you can then have better proofreading experience.
It is recommended to run proofreading on each paragraph after you finish writing. This will help you make the necessary changes in the content then and there. However, you should also spare a significant amount of time for the final editing. And it is ideal to take a break between the time you finish your writing and when you conduct the final editing. A fresh mind will help you edit with more conviction.
3. Editing using a tool:
If you do not feel confident about your proofreading and editing skills, it is better to take the assistance of the online tool. Today, you can find a great number of editing tools on the internet. Grammarly happens to be the most popular editing tool in today’s date. And why would not it be? It is user-friendly, and it offers its basic features for free of cost.
If you use its free version, then Grammarly allows you to check the spelling and grammatical errors in the document. It highlights all the basic grammatical and spelling errors and suggests the correct alternative. If you choose the premium version, it will allow you to run advanced grammar check as well as plagiarism checks on the document. A lot of assignment help providers on internet use Grammarly for their work.
With these aforementioned tips, you can remove the errors from your document. However, if you want to improve your editing skills, you need to work even harder.
How to improve your proofreading skills?
Every student wants to present an error-free paper and secure better grades. However, producing flawless content requires a lot of work. Here are a few measures that you can adopt in order to improve your proofreading skills:
1.Compare the documents:
If you get your assignment edited from an expert or get it done from an online tool, it is advised to compare the original copy with the edited copy. The comparison will tell you which mistakes are repeating and where you need to work more.
2. Practice editing the papers:
The more you practice proofreading, the better you are supposed to get at the task. It may not happen overnight. However, continuous practice will certainly help you improve your skill. With practice, you will start to recognise the incorrect spelling and punctuation in the paper in one look.
3. Read the content out loud:
Lastly, you should practice reading your content out loud once you are done writing it. At times, you may not identify the errors by just looking at the content. You need to spell the sentences in order to understand what is wrong with it. There are chances that reading out loud will help you identify errors more effectively than reading the content silently.
Hopefully, this blog was insightful enough and has helped you improve your knowledge about certain proofreading hacks. Practices these tips and tricks while working on your documents, and you will definitely see a change in the quality of your content.