| | It is said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so having worked hard to prepare a document (whether it’s for a brochure or website or report or whatever), it seems such a waste to allow careless errors to catch the reader’s eye and send out the wrong signals!
That’s why proofreading is not just a matter of being fussy, it’s more about highlighting one’s accuracy and attention to detail and illustrating to a prospective client that you take the same high level of care when dealing with them on a business level.
Word content is, of course, of paramount importance but if it’s littered with mistakes such as misspellings, lack of punctuation, poor grammar etc., the quality of the words may become just a little tarnished.
If you decide to proofread your own document, don’t do it immediately after finishing the writing. It’s too fresh in your memory then and you will certainly miss things, if only because you know what you meant to write and subconsciously you think you have written it correctly, so you miss potentially glaring errors.
Leave it for hours or even days (if you can afford the time) and preferably let someone else (a spouse or friend, perhaps) read over it – they are more likely to see the mistakes you missed! One trick worth noting if you are proofing it yourself is to change the layout – try a different font and type size – so that it might appear like a new document to your own eyes!
Some tips:
Spellcheckers
Never rely on your computer’s spellchecker – first of all, they generally have an American vocabulary, and we all know that the Americans can’t spell. So ‘favour’ becomes ‘favor’ and ‘programme’ becomes ‘program’ (which is only right when it relates to IT issues!). In addition, spellcheckers can’t differentiate between the likes of ‘complementary’ and ‘complimentary’, or between ‘to’ and ‘too’ or ‘your’ and ‘you’re’.
Read backwards
Read the document backwards – from the last word on the last page back to the beginning - if you want to be ultra careful on the spelling. Your focus is purely on the spelling of each word without the distraction of grammar, punctuation or the content. It’s a very slow process but a very accurate way of avoiding spelling errors.
Punctuation
Punctuation marks are effectively the traffic lights in your document as a comma here, or a dash there, tells the reader when to pause, when to go and when to stop. Proper punctuation helps the whole flow of the document and prevents misunderstandings or the need to go back over the sentence again to see if it makes sense the second time!
Reference Books
It’s not possible to know every word or variation of a word so keep a modern dictionary, thesaurus and any relevant handbooks close to hand, so if you are unsure about anything, you have the means to double-check.
Read slowly,
Seems a little obvious, of course, but reading quickly is where mistakes are made. The whole point is to take time over the document so you pick up those little errors that may have crept into your draft.
Ideally, invest in a professional proofreader because he/she is trained and practised in the art and will bring an independent eye to the project.
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