Top tips for editing and proofreading your work
Introduction
Editing and proofreading are the two stages of putting together an assignment that are most often missed out. Here we provide some advice for how you can edit and proofread your own work.
Tips
What are editing and proofreading?
We often refer to editing and proofreading as the same process however, they can be considered as separate stages when completing assignments.
What is editing?
Editing your work involves addressing aspects such as the organisation and structure of what you have written, ensuring that what you have written makes sense. It can also focus on the style and presentation (Cottrell, 2019).
What is proofreading?
Proofreading focuses on your written language. It identifies problems to do with your spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Don’t leave editing and proofreading to the end
Editing and proofreading are often considered to be the last stages of putting together your work. However, you should plan to do some editing as you progress with your work. You can make decisions such as whether you have included enough evidence to support the points you are making after writing each paragraph. Or after you have written a section, you can decide whether information could be re-organised to give your work a better flow.
Editing your work as you go helps to make it a less daunting task at the end. It also encourages you to continuously improve the quality of what you are writing.
Share the task
If you have someone available (friend, family, colleague), ask whether they can read a paragraph of your work back to you, listening to what you have written helps you to focus on it in a different way. If you don’t have anyone to do this with, there are plenty of online tools that convert text to speech (Speechify – available as a web app from the Apple Store and Google Play Store).
Learn from previous errors you’ve made
Go back through your previous assignments and create a checklist based on the feedback you have received. Use this checklist to make sure that you are not making the same errors again, and show your lecturers you are learning from their advice.
Have a set of questions to focus your editing
When reading back through your work it’s good to have a set of questions to help focus the editing process. Go through your work, sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, section-by-section with questions such as:
- Have I supported my main points with evidence?
- Have I shown evidence of wide research, or have I relied heavily on a couple of resources?
- Have I made it clear what the sources of my information are?
- Is the text easy to read?
- Are my sentences too long, do they include multiple points? Could any of my sentences be broken down into two separate sentences?
- Is my work presented consistently? Have I included more that one font? Is my work all the same size?
- Does my work follow any guidelines I was provided by my module tutor?
Use grammar checking software with caution
There are tools available that can check your spelling and grammar; however, these tools are not always reliable. Be sure that you are using these tools with caution – make sure you are double checking any suggested changes and ask yourself whether the changes fit with the context of your work.
When proofreading your work, read your work out loud
When reading your work back, you should try to read your work out loud. Skim reading your work doesn’t always enable your brain to identify errors. Look for typing, spelling and punctuation errors. Have you written in complete sentences throughout? Try new strategies, paste your work sentence-by-sentence into a blank document, this enables you to focus on each sentence without any other text to distract you.
