What are the top three tips to remember when proofreading your writing?

Answer 1

It's extremely helpful to read your essay out loud. Reading aloud helps you catch missing words, sentences that don’t flow, and ideas that aren’t clearly articulated. If you don't have a strong ear for grammar and flow, this tip may not work for you. To develop your ear for flow, read other people’s aloud and get to know the style, like a new genre of music.

Reading aloud is great when it works, but that's also one of the most conventional tips out there.

Here are 3 powerful, yet unconventional tips for proofreading your work.

Tip #1: Outsource your brain!

Unless you have a well-developed "grammar ear," that is, your ability to hear grammar mistakes, I recommend using an online grammar tool like Hemingway App or Grammarly to highlight potential grammar mistakes. That way, you can see visually how your writing compares to how well you thought you proofread, and you can make better editing decisions that way.

Grammarly can also help you catch accidental plagiarism (or those sentences that you didn’t quite “summarize” well enough from the original text).

Tip #2: Double-check your citations

Citations are one of those “easy to catch” mistakes that help professors grade quickly, and create a real pain for students trying to get an A on an essay. There are some citation generators out there that do a decent job, but they’re not perfect.

To speedily write your citations, use a citation generator to save time, but also check your citation is correct using the Purdue OWL.

Tip #3: Do you really have a clear and compelling thesis statement? (Really?!)

Even though the college level writing class I taught had a lesson on how to write a complex, compelling thesis statement, some of my students would still struggle to put a clear statement in their paper. You may even be missing a thesis statement without realizing it!

Don’t be afraid to signal you’re entering “thesis statement” territory.

This can be signaled by the words, “I argue that…” or “This paper argues…”

Answer 2

1) Read it aloud: Slowly, almost like a radio host. Listen for any mistakes, as well. Anything that sounds odd, dive into the text immediately to fix it.

2) Relevance: Imagine you're telling the story to a smart, curious friend. They WANT to understand the story, but weren't there to experience what you experienced. Include only the most relevant/necessary facts and details.

3) Think empathetically: Imagine you're in the shoes of your reader. Are you explaining your thoughts and feelings clearly enough? Can they follow your storytelling clearly enough?

Answer 3

1. Read your work out loud. It's astonishing how many errors we miss when reading in our head. When reading something too quickly or in your head, your brain will fill in the blanks or automatically correct spelling and contextual errors. Reading out loud forces you to separate what you intended to write from what was written, thus exposing more errors.
2. Pay close attention to natural pauses in speech. If you're trying to fix run-on sentences, focus on where you naturally pause in the sentence when reading the work back to yourself. These pauses usually indicate where the sentence needs to be broken up with a comma or a period.
3. Consider re-reading multiple times. Even if you apply several strategies, you might need a couple of read-throughs to catch everything. Without overdoing it, re-read your work multiple times.