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.

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!