This offers one added benefit: Your partner can offer a suggestion, correction or question that will lead to a better end product. I would add one item to your list… Read your story aloud to a writing partner. I’ll continue right on with my hard copy revisions, though, as I believe they truly are the best way to find mistakes or other fixes in my writing. Funny how technology has made paper and pens obsolete for some people. And they’re quite serious, as if I might not know. When I’ve revised things like this in a public place, I sometimes have people come up to me and tell me that I can do that on the computer. I may make a pass or two on the computer, but most of the revision/editing work I do is on paper. I always print out my work and revise on hard copy. (I hope that it’s not just a habit of the “mature” generation that will be lost to those younger.)Įxcellent post.
to find my mistakes as I go along.įor multi-page reports, I find using a red pen to proofread a paper printout out loud and away from the computer always works best for me, too. Even better: read out loud to someone who has another copy of the text in front of them.Ībsolutely agree! Most of us spend way too much time staring at computer screens, its actually a nice ‘break for the eyeballs’ and, speaking for myself, it kind of forces me to focus more because I am so used to just skimming the screen and depending on using spell check, etc. Reading out loud is a good way to proofread. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Writing Basics category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:ġ5 Responses to “Proofreading from Hard Copy” His first novel, Beneath Gray Skies, an alternate history novel dealing with a Confederacy in the 1920s, is available through Amazon, etc. He works as a writer and journalist, specializing in IT- and financial-related work. Hugh Ashton was born in the UK, and now lives in Kamakura, Japan, where he has lived for 21 years. You read forwards and read what you expect to see, instead of what’s already there.Īs I say, you may not find that all these work for you, but all are worth trying at least once. Since the words come in an unfamiliar and unnatural order, you are more likely to find mistakes than if basic spell-checking in context), read backwards (i.e. It means that you will be able to work on other people’s work, and they on yours when necessary. Take the trouble to learn the standard proofreading signs and symbols.When you come to make the corrections on the computer, use another color (say blue) to check off the corrections as you make them. Use a red (or at least a color other than black) pen or pencil to mark up your text.It forces a higher level of concentration than silent reading. When you have finished proofreading the entire piece, make the corrections on the computer, crossing them off on paper as you go. Move away from the computer, or at least close the file. Don’t make the corrections on the computer as you find them.
Number the pages, especially if you print double-sided. Print out your work double-spaced, and leave wide margins at left and right for comments and corrections.Don’t try to lay the piece out in its final format – concentrate on the words, not the appearance. Mistakes (especially punctuation errors) often seem to show themselves more often when your writing appears in this form. Use Courier, or some other non-proportional typeface.I’ve picked up some basic ideas in the course of years to deal with the problem of proofreading from paper. For any long pieces of writing (“long” being over 1,000 words), I almost always print out my documents and sit down with a red pencil, away from the computer. This is the way we all learned to read, and many people still recommend proofreading long pieces of writing using printed output, since it comes more naturally to most than screen-based checking. The only way of reading words, until recently was through marks on a writing surface such as paper, sometimes referred to derisively by techno-nerds as “sliced dead trees”. Of course, it has not always been this way. It’s destined for the Web or another online destination, and may never exist in permanent form. Sometimes that’s the final form of the writing. Proofreading from Hard Copy By Guest Authorįew people now (with the possible exception of poets) write on paper.įor most of us, our thoughts take shape on screen, and our words exist as magnetic patterns on disk, rendered as phosphor dots, or the flat screen equivalent.