Proofreading Exercise With Answers

[Dallas Querry]

Justcopy and paste each passage into a Microsoft Word document and make any changes you feel are necessary (focusing on clear errors rather than style, phrasing, etc., for this exercise). After that, you can compare the changes you made to our suggestions further down the page.

I am a highly driven Manager with over ten years experience. My hands-on approach has led to many significant contract wins. My out standing networking skills have secured several important clients, and my ability to develop professional relationships has resulted in a 22% percent increase in sales for my organization. I employed modernist management methods, tailored to insure maximum productivity. I was also directly involved in the development of strategies that enhanced work flows and reduced redundancy through the organization. I am currently seeking a new challenge that will benefit from my meticulous attention to detail, and and friendly professional manor.

There were also some typos (e.g., misspelling solely as soley; use of a hyphen in place of a parenthetical en dash; the misspelling of separate; the confusion of except and expect). And there were two sentences where articles were missing (e.g., inasmuch as picture and but at image).

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I have a problem where I often proof my own writing and I don't catch all the errors while I am reading through it. I often miss entire words out of sentences or find myself repeating words. I can read a document several times and I catch new errors every time. Eventually, I'll feel like I've caught everything, but I find out after I've posted or printed it that I left out some word. The whole process takes hours instead of a few minutes. This process is so frustrating that sometimes I just give up. Does anyone have this experience writing and if so, what techniques have you developed that help?

P.S:

For some reason, I make fewer errors and my writing is a lot speedier if I write it out long hand first. For some reason, the word processor makes it hard to keep your train of thought going because you find yourself derailed by the formatting. I also found using NotePad to be a useful tool. Since it doesn't have formatting, it is less distracting. I also set the width of the Window to be very short. For some reason, my thoughts are less likely to get derailed and I make fewer errors.

Reading out loud slows you down so that you are less likely to read over a duplicated word and it will be more obvious when a word is left out. It is also a good method for detecting awkward sentence construction.

I use a Mac. I use the built-in Text-to-Speech feature to read back aloud the words I have written. It is by far superior to reading yourself because the brain sometimes skips things right in front of your eyes! And the more tired your eyes, the ears usually hear better! You can achieve similar results if you use a PC.

I think the answer to your specific problem is that there is no simple solution. There is no trick. Reading out loud does definitely help, but ultimately if your mind is subconsciously fixing the errors as you go so that you read right over them without taking any notice, it's going to happen when you're reading out loud just the same.

Something I have done with considerable success is to read the finished product in a much larger font. When you are reading along in your normal font, it is easier for your mind to anticipate and gloss over words, even when they are obviously incorrect. By increasing the font size, an error tends to stand out more clearly, making it more difficult to gloss over.

All of these are excellent ideas, and if you are planning to do multiple passes through your work, it would be good to use at least two different techniques. Anything that gets through the first pass might be more easily detected in the second pass by using a different technique. Either way, I strongly agree with the recommendation to set it aside at least a couple of weeks. That way you don't do as much anticipating as you are reading.

BTW - I read somewhere that people tend to use the creative side of their brain when they are writing using longhnad, but they use the other side of their brain when they are typing. As a result, typing out your story as you are trying to develop it can prove to be difficult for some people because their creative side is not being engaged as much.

I don't know whether you do this or not, but one of the best ways of proofreading I've found is to print out the document and read it through in the paper format, rather than trying to proofread writing on screen.

Mark up your corrections on the paper in a particular coloured ink and correct them on-screen. Now take a break and do something else before going back to the paper proof again and correct the next set of errors in a different colour and so on until all corrections have been found.

Yes, removal of errors usually results in an improved piece. But many other improvements require restructuring, better word choices, removal of stale idioms, switching passive voice to active voice, etc.

I just recalled a friend telling me years ago that he witnessed professional proof readers and editors, who work for publishers, use a pencil to plot a dot over each and every word as they read through a manuscript. It forces them to read every word. Of course, it is only a matter of time before your brain goes on autopilot again, especially on very long documents.

I thought of another idea from folks here about reading aloud and even a software suggestion. A speech synthesis program can help by reading the text back to you. It won't get the tone and pace right, but it helps as you read along.

After your first proof-reading pass, change the margin slightly on your window - perhaps just by half an inch. This will cause all the text to wrap at a different point and previously hidden errors will become apparent on the second pass.

Of course I think that (as others have suggested) reading it out loud is the very best way, this way is quick and will always turn up a few more. In fact, it will reveal errors that will be MISSED by reading it aloud.

You mentioned, that the formatting of your word processor is distracting you while reading through your text. One suggestion is using a Markup language like Markdown, that is also used on Stackexchange. This will separate your writing from formatting and you can use any text editor (like Notepad).

Newer versions of Word (and most other word processors, I'd imagine) attempt to catch words that are spelled correctly but used in the wrong context. An example I see all the time is 'been' for 'being'. E.g. 'Are you been serious?'. In Word, potential errors like this are highlighted in blue when the grammar checker's on.

Also, I use an online editor called Autocrit. It's one of the few pieces of software I pay for. It highlights commonly overused words, repeated words and much more. For the novel I recently published, I put the whole thing through Autocrit before giving it to my human editor. It took me ages to review and address the issues this showed up, but it livened up my writing no end and left my editor free to focus on higher-level issues.

The best proofreader I ever worked with always read everything twice -- once forward and once backwards. The first reading caught punctuation mistakes as well as obvious errors; the backwards reading made every spelling error or unplanned repetition stand out very clearly.

Change the format of the whole manuscript to a different font preferably with the following properties: A font you never read in, one that is similar to cursive (handwritten). Also change the line spacing if you need.

Use text-to-speech software. It's available on almost every computer nowadays, for free. The advantage of this is that the computer is stupid and will read whatever you have written, even if it makes no sense. (Of course, this approach assumes you will recognize the mistake when you hear it.) Human readers will instead often unconsciously fix textual mistakes as they read aloud.

(OT: My experience in teaching young children is that this human tendency to fix/guess often hinders learning to read, especially for comprehension. Watch for that with your kids. When they are reading aloud, don't let them paraphrase the text. Force them to read it word for word, phrase by phrase, exactly as written. [Scanning and speedreading are for skilled readers, not for beginners.] If your kids can't do this with age-appropriate texts, then they either need more phonics work, or they have dislexic issues, or they are rushing too much.)

You could try using some sort of text-to-speech program. Once you've finished your writing, get the text-to-speech software to read it out to you. Missing words will stand out much more, and you can do it as often as you want without annoying a human :)

Are you doing any technical writing? I work for a professional services company that does a lot of technical writing. We use automated scripts to help us with the trivial stuff so we can focus on content. One example is dealing with acronyms and making sure that they are called out correctly. This can take hours of your valuable time if you do it manually but goes much faster with a little technical help.

Edit: Good answers! Thanks. Just to clarify: The English (which is none of our's mother tongue) could be a lot worse and I had worse. With my last two students I did the mistake of correcting everything, which was a lot of work. Now I thought back and asked myself whether this is really my job. According to the answers - it actually isn't. Thanks!

As a supervisor it is not your job to proofread your student's work, but it is your job to help them produce good-quality work. Good communication skills are critical in research, therefore you should take some sort of action to improve your student's writing. When you communicate this to your student, make sure to present it in a constructive way, rather than as a criticism.

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