Proofreading is the final check of a text before it is published, printed or sent. The writing is finished; the proofreader's job is to find the mistakes still in it: misspelled words, missing words, wrong punctuation, inconsistent spelling or formatting. The name comes from printing, where a "proof" was a trial copy pulled from the press so that errors could be caught before the full run.
Proofreading, editing and copyediting
The three are often confused, and doing them in the wrong order wastes time:
- Editing looks at the content: is the argument clear, is anything missing, does the structure work? Paragraphs move and sentences are rewritten.
- Copyediting works sentence by sentence: clarity, word choice, grammar and consistency with a style guide.
- Proofreading comes last and changes as little as possible. It catches errors; it does not rewrite.
Proofread a text before it is finished and the next round of edits will bring in new mistakes.
What to look for
- Spelling, including names, product names and technical terms, which a dictionary cannot vouch for.
- Words that are real but wrong: homophones (their for there), and typos that make another word (form for from, manger for manager).
- Grammar: subject-verb agreement, tense, missing or doubled words (the the).
- Punctuation: apostrophes, comma splices, unmatched quotation marks and brackets.
- Consistency: one spelling variety, one style for the Oxford comma, the same capitalisation of headings, numbers and dates written the same way throughout.
- Facts on the page: figures, dates, prices, names of people and places, links and cross-references.
- Layout: headings, spacing, page breaks and anything that moved when the text changed.
Techniques that work
The hardest part of proofreading your own work is that you know what it is supposed to say, so your eyes read that instead of what is there. These habits break the effect:
- Take a break first. Even an hour away makes the text less familiar.
- Change how it looks. Print it, or change the font and size on screen. A new layout makes you read rather than recognise.
- Read aloud, slowly. You hear missing words and clumsy sentences that silent reading skips over.
- One pass per kind of mistake. One pass for spelling, one for punctuation, one for numbers and names. Looking for everything at once means missing something.
- Read backwards for spelling. Going from the last word to the first takes away the meaning, leaving only the words.
- Keep a list of your own habits. Most writers repeat the same few mistakes; check for those deliberately.
Where the spell checker fits
An automatic check is a good first pass, not a replacement for the human one. The Spell Checker is free and needs no account. It finds spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes in more than 30 languages, and with Picky mode on it adds style suggestions such as wordy phrases and repetition. Words it does not know but you use correctly, such as names and jargon, can go into your personal dictionary, which is kept in your browser, so they are not flagged again. You can paste text or add a file (TXT, DOC, DOCX, ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown, EPUB or PDF, scans included), a whole document of up to 150,000 characters per check, and download the corrected text as PDF, Word, OpenDocument, RTF, text, HTML or Markdown.
After the automatic pass, do the human one. A checker does not know that the meeting is on Tuesday, not Thursday, or that the client's name has an e at the end. For mistakes that depend on meaning, the AI Spell Checker reads the text in context.