It’s one of the less fun, to say the least, parts of
writing, even for someone like me who loves to write. But proofreading matters,
no matter what type of writing you do.
If you’re a lawyer, it’s hard to make a good impression on clients, the
court, or other attorneys you work with (or against) if you send documents with
typos. If you write fiction, nothing is
more distracting to a reader, or more likely to alienate a potential publisher,
than grammatical mistakes or spelling errors.
We’d all like to think our plots or characters or arguments are so
compelling that the reader will soldier on despite being yanked out of the
narrative by errors in spelling, format, or grammar. But why take the chance? And why would you want your reader – whether
a book purchaser, judge, or business colleague – to stop in the middle of what
you wrote to wonder whether a comma really belongs there or why that word looks wrong?
Ironically, the ease of revising documents
today compared to the days of typewriters and photocopiers actually seems to
make producing perfect text harder. It’s
possible via email and word processing and electronic publishing to edit
documents down to the very last second, and so we do it. Which makes it more likely we’ll miss errors. Below are my top eight tips for producing
perfect copy. You won’t be able to use all of them all the time. But if you apply a few, chances are your
finished work will be much closer to perfect.
(1) Give yourself time. If it’s at all possible, aim to finish your
brief, story, or statement the evening before it’s due so you can look at it
fresh in the morning. It’s amazing what
will jump out at you. If that’s not possible,
and often it’s not these days, find a way to set the document aside for at
least an hour, during which time you should do something completely unrelated,
before the last read through.
(2) Print and print preview. At least once when your document is close to
final, print it and review it on paper. When
you make final edits, print at least the pages you’ve changed, set them aside
for a few minutes, then look one last time.
And before you email or submit any document, use the print preview
feature on your word processor to eyeball the entire document. Check for formatting aspects such as margins,
paragraph indents, and spacing. Nothing
is more frustrating than slaving over a 10 or 20-page manuscript, making a last
minor change, and not realizing it threw your formatting off so that suddenly
there’s a half a blank page in the middle, or the font shrunk to 8 point on
page three. The reader sees this major problem
and thinks you never bothered even to glance at the work before
you sent it. A quick review with print
preview ensures your document looks good overall.
(3) Read aloud.
Reading a document aloud helps you get a fresh look and spot
mistakes. I often read my outgoing emails
aloud before I send. (This also helps me
recognize if the tone of the email is other than what I intended.) For longer documents, or shorter turn around
times, try just reading aloud the areas you’re struggling with or the areas to
which you made your last changes.
(4) Use a ruler. If you’ve rewritten a document several times
and your eyes are blurring, try placing a ruler under each line of text as you
read. This helps you focus on one line
at a time and makes it easier to spot mistakes.
(5) Read backwards.
Reading backwards won’t help you with grammar, but it will help you spot
spelling errors and spacing issues like th is one. Reading forwards, your mind tends to fill in
the blanks and correct errors because, as hard as you try, your brain focuses on
the content, not the actual words.
Reading backwards short-circuits that.
This approach obviously is not for entire novels or even 25-page
briefs. It can be very effective,
however, for a short document that you absolutely need to be perfect.
(6) Share the work.
Ask a clerk, secretary, or colleague who has never reviewed your
document before to read it. Even if the
person you ask is not a fantastic proofreader, he or she will almost certainly
spot errors you read right through because you know the writing so well. (If you’re a lawyer, you may wonder, why not
let the client or your supervising partner do that – she or he is going to read
the document anyway. Yes, but do you
really expect your client or supervisor to act as your assistant and correct your
mistakes? Really?)
(7) Aim for perfection. Make it your goal to provide a story or brief
or memo that’s free from all errors. Is
that realistic? Probably not, especially
if you are working on an 85,000 word novel.
But if you aim for a perfect document, the odds are, at worst, you will miss
a few typos. If you mentally shrug your
shoulders and decide that typing “where” instead of “wear” or “therefore”
instead of “therefor” really doesn’t matter, it’s likely you’ll produce work
with many errors. (Homonyms – words that
sound the same but are spelled differently like “where” and “wear” – are the
main reason you can’t rely on your word processor’s spell checker alone for
proofreading.)
(8) Start well and end well. In a very long document, particularly if you
need to finish within a short time period, you may not be able to proof the
entire document one last time after your final changes and before calling it
finished. So, at the very least, make
your first page and last page perfect.
Read them aloud, read them backwards, read them with a ruler to be sure
those pages shine. Why? The beginning of a document provides the
reader’s first impression, and the end of the document will be most likely to
be remembered. Make your first and last
impressions good ones.
Now, if there are typos in the above, I’m going to be really
embarrassed.
Lisa M. Lilly is an attorney and author of Kindle occult bestseller THE AWAKENING, short story collection THE TOWER FORMERLY SEARS AND TWO OTHER TALES OF URBAN HORROR, and numerous poems, short stories, and articles.
