I was doing research for some parenting articles yesterday, and linked back to one of my earlier blog posts about baby crib mattresses. (Captivating topic, no?) I began skimming the article for a good sentence to use as a link and for some additional information. (Do you think I actually remember anything I write?)
To my embarrassment, I discovered this sentence: “The firmer and better quality foam mattresses way more than cheaper ones, but they are still not as heavy as most inner spring mattress[es].”
Yikes! Two typos in that one — neither picked up by spellcheck. I’ve put one in brackets, but I’ll let you spot the other one on your own. I had to read the sentence three times to figure out what I meant. “Way more… what?” I asked myself. Ooooh… “Weigh more!”
I didn’t do a very good job proofreading the article, but I’m going to share with you a foolproof way to proofread and edit in just five easy steps. This time-tested technique works for every piece!
1. Read it aloud. If I had read the article out loud, I would have realized how awkward the sentence sounded. From there, I would have noticed the misspellings and — bam! — embarrassing errors erased! (Bam! is my superhero onomatopoeia for spotting and obliterating bad writing.)
2. Read it sentence by sentence. This sounds odd — how else would we read but word by word, sentence by sentence? What I mean is: read each sentence as a stand-alone entity. When we read for content, our brain fills in what we THINK the sentence says, rather than what it really says. If we read each sentence slowly and separately, we’ll spot errors more easily.
3. Read it backwards. This serves the same purpose as spellcheck — it gets us to look carefully at the spelling of each individual word. You may also spot extraneous -ly words and other filler to delete.
Of course, you’ll also want to use Ken Rand’s ten-percent solution and find unnecessary words using the search function of your word processor. If you use this quick and easy process with everything you write, you won’t find yourself looking back and cringing at past work.
With my error being part of a blog where I have admin access, I could easily correct it. But I think I’ll leave it up for posterity. (Really…posterity. And I’ll be “way more” careful next time I right — er, write.)
Step 1: Never use the word foolproof. Nothing is, in large part due to the universal inability to properly anticipate the eventual level of foolishness that will arise.
Good tips. Although I find reading out loud to be worthless. The problem is that I already know what it is supposed to say and I end up reading it that way. The only real help is to have someone else read it out loud, but that is slow and requires another person.
Llama, llama.
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Yeah the reading out loud tip is one of the best. Not only does it make you realize awkward wordings, but it also means that you can’t skim. I’m really bad about skimming when I read and that helps.
Re: Step 3: Another tip I’ve heard is to read whatever you are proofreading upside down. Reading backwards is awkward to me.
When I realized my editor had left three emails on my cell phone, I decided she must have something very important to discuss with me. When I listened to her first frantic voice mail, I began to laugh. I had paid this wonderful person a lot of money to insure there were no errors in my manuscript before I placed it on my website as a digital eBook download. Her message stated, I have discovered two sentences with missing words in them. Please do not publish the eBook until you call me! Please call soon!
This goes to prove that we are all human and can read right through a sentence and consider it perfect, even if a word or two are missing. Reading your work twice, then reading it out loud, then reading it backwards, all help to insure accuracy, but the best proof reader is still another person. I now give my manuscripts or articles to my eighty-three year old mother. She is not good with proper sentence structure, but she certainly is excellent at catching the missed or incorrect words. She also costs a lot less then a second publisher.
Ronnie Coleinger