Take A Second Look

Any proofreader, professional or not, knows that the second readthrough is super important. You’ve done the first one, fixed all the obvious mistakes, devoured the accuracies the way a lioness devours a zebra, and then you’re suddenly at the end of your document. But your editing doesn’t end there.

The second readthrough is something everyone should do with their own documents, whether it’s someone else’s work you’re proofreading, or your own. If you don’t read your own work, how are you going to figure out if there’s anything wrong with what you put? I don’t notice my own typos on the first time around myself. You can use Word’s editor if you’re writing on Word, which will catch some errors, but it’s important to find and catch all the errors they miss yourself.

And trust me, you will make errors, no matter how good your content is. Everyone does, it’s no reflection on you. Go ahead, embrace it! I make mistakes, you make mistakes, we all make mistakes. It’s why the second readthrough is so important. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe you’ll have found all your mistakes already. But usually, the second readthrough will help you find just one thing you’ve misssed.

Tonal Shifting

“Tone” is a word that seems to come up every time you write anything in school, university, absolutely anywhere. You are told to write creatively, write formally, write as if you’re talking to someone who knows nothing at all. And yet, they don’t really tell you what it means to have that tone. You’re the one who has to figure that out.

You want to write with a tone, proofread with a tone, and copy-edit without breaking that tone. You have one hint - what kind of document you’ve been set to write or proofread, or copy-edit. After that, you have to figure it out. Do you use contractions? Does the writer know what you’re talking about? Are you expected to explain every little thing, or leave certain obvious facts out?

If it’s an essay, or a thesis, or something equally factual and analytical, it usually means to spare most contractions (some are more acceptable than others) and to use a formal tone. You know what the audience wants. It wants you to inform them, to tell them that this is what you were looking at, and this is what you found out.

A work of fiction is much harder, because the tone can be very different. Is it descriptive? Is it colloquial? Is it past or present tense? Is it first, second or third person? If it’s the latter, what kind of third person is it - limited, or omniscient? There is really no way to write fiction with the wrong tone, unless you use it to inform. The audience almost always reads fiction to be entertained. And because no one can entertain everyone in the world who reads their book, they have to pick and choose their tone by targeting the audience they want.

As a proofreader or copy-editor, your job (and my job) is to identify the tone before you start editing. And to make sure that not only are they keeping the tone consistent throughout the whole thing, but that your edits (especially as a copy-editor, where you’re playing with words more) never break the tone.

Writing Numbers - The Double-Digit Rule

This is probably one of the lesser-known rules in writing. Mainly formal writing - news articles, journal articles, theses and essays. This is the “Number Rule”. Do you write the numbers as a word, or do you just put the digits down?

Well, the rule is actually very simple. Write single number like, “one”, “two”, etc, as words, all the way up to nine. Once you go into double digits, though, then it’s time to switch to digits, like “10”, “11”, etc. This is really important for reporting statistics, where you’re probably going to have percentages, means, modes, ranges and many other numerical findings.

That brings me to the exception of the rule. Usually, if you’re using statistics, chances are you won’t have any single numbers to write out. But if you do, you need to put consistency over correction and put those in digits, too. You can check with a supervisor, publisher or tutor if you’re not sure about this. But, when in doubt, make them all the same.

But, if you’re writing fiction, theses, essays or news, remember the double-digit rule. Singles are words, doubles are digits.

Be Your First Proofreader

Okay, so as a proofreader, I’ve read several different kinds of documents. Blogs, biographies, theses and fiction. My job is to look at this work and write all over it, inserting comments and tracking changes, making it perfect. And I love my job.

But here’s a little secret: Proofreaders love it when you make their job easier.

You know your work best. You don’t have to be professional to proofread your own work, or make it less clunky, or figure out a word you missed out. The proofreader you hire doesn’t know which word you forgot to write, or what you meant by that, or why you put two decimal points in one number. You can give us specific instructions all you want, but there’s a lot of edits that you will always do better than us.

Before you send your work off to a proofreader, I advise you to have a go at it yourself. You don’t have to be professionally trained to notice everything, but a couple of rereads never hurt. You can still hire a proofreader to clean things up and they will often notice things you still miss because of their training, but we love nothing more than an error-free page. That kind of writing proves that our clients have put in the effort to proofread before they sent it off to us, and we have a lot of respect for that kind of dedication.

A few of my clients have sent me work to edit that is riddled with errors that I know they could have fixed on their own. Others have sent me work with long stretches of perfectly clear, concise and grammatically perfect writing, just with little mistakes sprinkled here and there. I’m sure you can guess which one makes my job easier.

So o ahead, hire a proofreader to check out your work. But don’t just rely on professional work. Be your own first proofreader. You know what you want to say better than anyone else.

Homonym Confusion

This is one of the most common mistakes in the English language. We have a lot of words that sound the same and look the same, but have totally different meanings. Most of them also have different spellings, which makes them a nightmare to differentiate. Common mistakes are between:

“There” and “Their” (One is to pinpoint a specific place, and the other is a possessive for a group of people – something that belongs to them).

“Too” and “To” (One is used to add something to a point, be it a person or a fact, and the other is used before a location).

and “Your” and “You’re”. (One is the possessive, something belongs to you, and the other is a contraction, meaning “You are”).

I’ve made some of those mistakes as a student, but I was always able to correct them before anyone else saw them. It’s very easy to make those mistakes, especially with “To” and “Too” – just don’t let your finger rest on the “O” key too long! It’s also something spellcheck can’t see, as you’ve spelled the word correctly – it’s just not the word you wanted. But of course, don’t worry too much. You know the spelling. Just give your work a good check to make sure no mistaken homonyms have crept in. They’re just as easy to fix, as they are to make.

Spellcheck Your Spellchecks!

One of the worst ever problems with spellcheck on computers is that it often doesn’t catch the errors it needs to, or catches errors that aren’t even errors. This is what often kills your writing. Your spelling is correct, in the eyes of Spellcheck. Or you made up a word, and Spellcheck doesn’t know the word yet. But the most fatal and hardest to catch of any errors is the word spelled right – except that wasn’t the word you wanted.

This is an easy mistake to make. There’s a lot of words in the world and it’s so easy to write the wrong one. The homonym is often the culprit (even I almost wrote “right” instead of “write” just now), but even more maddening, and often harder to catch, is the typo. You accidentally put two letters the wrong way around. Okay, fine, Spellcheck should notice that. Except it creates a different word, and Spellcheck doesn’t know that’s not the word you wanted. How is it to know you wanted to talk about what you mean, not someone’s mane?

The biggest example, by far, appears to be when people write “form”, meaning “from”. Yes, they’re both real words, but you want a preposition describing a place where an object or person started out, not a noun asking you to fill in your name and address. This is a mistake I’ve made and caught too late, and I’ve seen it cropping up in PhDs, high school essays and even published magazine columns and books. Everyone does it and no one points it out.

Well, it’s time to start pointing it out. The typo that Spellcheck never notices can kill your work dead. Don’t let that happen!