30. PROOFREADING Effective proofreading involves self-awareness, preparation and time management. Although checking your spelling and grammar is extremely important, proofreading is much more than this; it also involves checking the ‘readability’ of your work and checking the quality of your argument. 1. Proofreading is about tricking your brain into believing it is reading new information. Print out a draft copy when you finish writing your assignment and leave it for 24-48 hours before proofreading. This is less tiring than proofreading on the screen and will trick your brain into viewing your writing as ‘new’, spotting mistakes that you would otherwise miss. 2. Become aware of the type of mistakes you make. It may be that you have problems with articles or subject/verb agreement or it may be to do with structuring paragraphs but knowing this makes proofreading much easier. Reflect on feedback from your tutors and send ASK a 500 word writing sample to identify your pattern of errors. 3. Do you know how to avoid the 20 most common errors in written English? http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/easywriter3e/20errors/ 4. Break your proofreading down into sub-tasks, each focusing on a separate aspect. Read through your assignment for errors in each of the following areas. Correct the errors and take a break before moving on to the next area: Spelling, grammar and punctuation; Academic style; Correct referencing and use of sources; Essay structure; Argument. 5. Learn how English punctuation works, so that you use commas, full-stops, colons, semi-colons and parentheses appropriately. Try reading out loud: if you run out of breath before you reach the next full-stop, you need more punctuation, e.g. insert a comma where you would normally breathe in, or break up a long complex sentence into two shorter ones and separate them with a full-stop or semicolon. 6. Read your work out loud to listen for grammatical mistakes and repeated words 7. Ensure that your bibliography, citations and/or footnotes conform to the referencing conventions for your subject (e.g. Harvard, APA, MLA, OSCOLA). Have you marked all quotations with “” followed by a citation? Does the bibliography contain all the works cited? If you have paraphrased or summarised from sources, are these sources all cited in the text 8. Write down any good examples encountered when reading, such as hedging terms (e.g. ‘it appears that’, ‘the evidence suggests that’) and signposting words (e.g. consequently, alternatively). Cottrell
© ASK, Brunel University Library, 2010
(2008:195) and Greetham (2008:242-3) have selections of useful signposting/transition words. Use these in your essays to help your argument ‘flow’.
© ASK, Brunel University Library, 2010