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Is there a difference between editing and proofreading? You can be sure there is! While both are integral to polishing your finished report or writeup, editing focuses on revising the structure and organisation of your work, and proofreading on the edited work. For proofreading, focus is on lower-order concerns such as grammar mistakes. This week’s post will uncover what you should look out for when undertaking editing and proofreading of your documents.
Since editing happens before proofreading, let’s begin with the former. There should be an acute interest in determining if all the parts of the question(s) asked have been answered. There must be an argument the report wants to explicate, and this has to be clearly spelt out. Additionally, all paragraphs of the document must support the overarching goal of the report. Once this is ascertained, the next thing to look out for in your editing is the overall structure. For example, have you included a well written introduction and conclusion? Is there a logical coherent development of the paragraphs or are they muddled up with so many different ideas in one? Remember to move a new idea to a new paragraph. More so, each paragraph should have transition markers to clearly show the flow of thoughts and ideas. If there are none, now would be the time to include them.
Another critical component of the editing process is to check for structure within the different paragraphs. I have mentioned in my previous posts that every paragraph ought to have a topic sentence that contributes to the overall idea of the report/essay. That central idea in the paragraph should also be adequately substantiated by the other sentences that follow – those I call supporting sentences. Check as you edit that each sentence contributes to the idea of the topic sentence.
Other aspects requiring editing would be the style and how clear the report is. On style, check for the appropriateness of tone for the intended audience; for varied sentence types; and for redundant and wordy expressions that add no meaning to the paragraph. On clarity, ensure there are no ambiguous expressions used and that major concepts are defined.
The next major step after editing is proofreading. It is pertinent that reports are carefully proofread before they are issued. Sometimes there are letters that are mixed up or words that are doubled. Normally, spell-checkers and grammar checkers should show up some errors, but they do not always do so. This is a cogent reason to proofread your writeup. If you can get someone else to proofread your work, that would be more advisable. I’ll now share some proofreading tips with you.
Before you embark on the proofreading exercise, read the report. And do so out loud. Your thinking speed is faster than your talking speed, so your head tends to move faster and assume all the words are there. But if you are to read out the words, you may be more likely to tell when any word has been omitted. Also, I have often heard it said that you should read the report backwards. While you may think of the time it’d cost you to do this, think more of how much beneficial it’d be to help you spot mistakes in spelling. Some would recommend you print out a copy of the report for proofreading because it forces you to be more focused than you would be on a screen. It is also a wise thing to do when you intentionally double-check proper names, citations, punctuation, page numbers and any other aspects of your writing that can easily be taken for granted. Again, do not proofread when you are exhausted – your mind would play a fast trick on you! Do so when you are refreshed and reinvigorated, when there are less distractions and you can focus completely, and when you are not drowsy or moody. Sometimes, it might be best for you to leave out proofreading until a day or two after your editing. That way you approach it from a fresh perspective. You might want to consult dictionaries or other sources that are useful to your proofreading exercise.
Remember that if you do not commit to this process of thoroughly proofreading your work, all the hard work put into researching and writing your report would be lost. It can be that costly a mistake to make! That’s because a poorly presented report, full of errors and inconsistencies in layout, has a damaging effect regardless of the quality of the content. There is thus no excuse for not identifying and correcting such mistakes before sending out the report to the intended audience.
Perhaps you would like to pay attention to some repeatedly overlooked errors in proofreading. Some of them are errors I have written about in the past, so if they are common to you, you may want to go back to past editions to be reminded of what to start doing right. One major issue to spot while proofreading is sentence fragments. I can’t state that enough. Unless you are engaged in some form of creative writing, it is wrong to write fragmented sentences. Sentence fragments have one or more parts of a sentence missing. This could be either the subject or the object. There could also be comma splices, which refer to the use of a comma in joining independent clauses. Unnecessary shifts in tenses also pose a major problem in many writeups, so watch out for those. When pronouns and their antecedents are lacking in agreement, it presents a forum for ambiguity and confusion. Remember, too, that there is need to verify word choices before usage. Homophones and homonyms are quite confusing for some writers. Be sure of the word you mean when you write and, while proofreading, pay double attention to the words used. Dangling and misplaced modifiers are a major bane, so reread to be sure words are placed closed to what is modifying them. Faulty parallelism is yet another error in sentence construction, and a good proof-reader would have eyes to spot and correct them. One last one would be lack of agreement in subject and verb relationships. Please recall that if the subject is singular, then the verb should be singular, and if it is plural, the verb should be the same too.
When these are well attended to by the writer, an almost perfect report would have been readied for a deserving audience.
