Proofreading practice (or how to avoid those embarrassing writing errors)

Wait... That's not how you spell 'disabled'...

Poorly written or edited copy will adversely affect how people view your content. Original copy can be undermined by poor spelling, wayward grammar and inconsistent style elements.

Put it this way: mistakes like these can seriously knock any professionalism you’re trying to project and quickly extinguish any authority that you’ve built.

Copy editing and proofreading are an important (often overlooked) step in the publishing process. Each has its own role.

Copy editing is about checking and improving the content, looking at the sentence structure, rewriting and applying good web writing guidelines where necessary. It’s where you’ll make the most changes.

Proofreading (aka ‘proofing’), meanwhile, is a little more basic. It’s about checking for spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, tense and tone errors. Not to mention, double-checking names, links and facts to ensure they are correct.

Proofreading practice

We can proofread, edit and check your articles, websites and general copy for you. Or you can do it yourself. Here are The Good Content Company’s tips for proofreading your content:

• You’ll make amends as you proofread, so run a spell check at the end
• Read through and manually check your spelling, punctuation and grammar
• Shorten long sentences and bulky paragraphs so that they’re easier to read
• Check for words that sound the same, such as: ‘their’, ‘there’ and ‘they’re’; ‘compleat’ and ‘complete’
• Check apostrophes, primarily ‘its’ and ‘it’s’. ‘DVD’s’ as a plural is wrong, ‘DVDs’ is right, and so on
• Check the spelling of companies, products and the names of people and places
• Check your facts. Again. Use the internet to look up anything that you are unsure of. Use a reputable site, preferably more than one to cross-reference. Don’t just put your faith into Wikipedia.
• Check that all of your links work and that email addresses are correct
• Ask yourself: “Is the tone consistent throughout?” and ”Is the tense consistent throughout?”
• Check for inconsistencies in terms of capitalisation, spelling and hyphenation. I.e. you capped up the word ‘Internet’ in one paragraph, but wrote ‘internet’ in another
• Eliminate pesky double spaces
• Finally, run that spellcheck in order to pick up any glaring errors that you’ve missed

It often helps to print an article out so you can check it on paper rather than onscreen. You can also try reading it aloud to get a feel for the pacing and the rhythm of the words, sentences and the general flow.

Did we mention that we can do your proofreading for you? Just send us an email…

photo credit: Nicobobinus

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