Writing an essay may take much of your time and effort. But you may find yourself even more challenged by finding and fixing the smallest typos and the most egregious errors to deliver perfect content. Thus, proofreading happens to be a difficult task that requires a broad knowledge of language and stylistics, as well as total concentration. This is the reason why many students decide to assign this task to an essay writing company, like Custom Essay Meister, offering the assistance of professional proofreaders.
If you decide to take the action by yourself, make sure you haven’t overlooked some of the most common mistakes.
- Not addressing the target readers: It is important to know the target audience you are writing to as it determines the tone and voice of your essay, as well as its overall syntax. Also, the target audience determines what type of information requires a more detailed explanation and what terms need to be used or omitted.
- Following an inconsistent style: Some grammatical, stylistic, and formatting nuances can be different depending on what style guide you decide to follow. This is the reason why you need to stick to one specific style guide throughout the writing process. Otherwise, you will end up with an inconsistent narration following the APA Style and then suddenly switching to the Chicago Style. This will cause nothing but readers’ confusion and even irritation.
- Making the wrong word choice: Many mistakes come up with the choice of incorrect words. These words are usually spelled and pronounced in the same way, although their meanings can happen to be totally different. For instance, the words his and he’s sound the same and have similar spellings. While the word his is a possessive version of the word he, the word he’s is the combination of the two words he and is.
- Neglecting sentence structure: Eventually, you may focus so much on grammar, spelling, or punctuation that you forget the basics behind parallelism. Parallelism enables uniformity and consistency throughout a paper so that it becomes easier for reading and understanding. Thus, your task is to make sure that each sentence is built up in a way that aligns well with the whole piece of writing.
- Making contextual errors: Writing rules are strict. But depending on the essay you are writing, the contextual strictness may vary. Whether it is a philosophy or economic essay, writing can adopt a more official or more casual style. When deciding whether to avoid standard rules, consider the target audience and purpose of your essay. To blend or break some writing rules, you can request the assistance of experienced proofreaders through the professional essay writing website like CustomWritings.com.
- Making spelling mistakes and typos: To meet the deadline, you are rushing to complete your essay as fast as possible. As a result, you can easily make some spelling mistakes without even noticing them. To fix them, you’d better use a spell-checker and a good dictionary to help you find a proper alternative for a misspelled word.
- Making grammatical mistakes: Grammar confusion is probably the most common issue in academic papers. For instance, the incorrect use of apostrophes or tenses can change the meaning of the whole thing. Many students make these types of mistakes when they are typing quickly so that you shouldn’t make these grammar confusions get into the final version of your essay. You can also look into easy typing for beginners websites and tools.
- Making punctuation mistakes: Deciding to put a point, a comma, or a semicolon can also cause confusion for you. So, you’d better have a punctuation guide in front of you while writing your essay and while making the final check.
- Forgetting to read your paper out loud: Reading out loud is a good way to detect any errors in the flow and coherence of your essay. You can read your paper by yourself or, even better, ask someone else to do it for you. You’ll realize how easy it is to find mistakes while listening.
- Forgetting to proofread at all: Rushing through the final-check phase or skipping it completely is the worst thing you can do. To make sure that your paper looks good, be ready to devote some time to proofreading.
Unconscious Mistakes in Proofreading
During the writing process, you might make mistakes without even realizing it. These unconscious mistakes happen for two reasons: the lack of attention and poor performance of your kinesthetic memory. Inattention occurs within a second because the mind acts faster than you can write the text. With kinesthetic memory, you most likely face the problems of misspelling a word, especially if you’ve had certain issues in the past.
Remember that proofreading can be effective only if being conducted in a proper manner. Thus, you should go slowly and take breaks. Be ready to proceed with more than one check to comb through your paper carefully.
The Need for Proofreaders is Real
As of July 2020, there are 4.57 billion active Internet users. Simply imagining all the traffic that these 4.57 billion users is driving will give you a sense of the volume of content being put out everyday. Currently, the indexed World Wide Web contains at least 5.52 billion pages and that number would only go higher.
To be more visible than the rest of the billions of pages coexisting today, managers of websites need to make sure that their content is not only interesting, timely and relevant, but also grammatically and formatically correct. This is where proofreaders come in.
It’s safe to say that there is a great need for proofreaders today. By reading up on and understanding what you need to know to become a proofreader, you’ll not only get new job opportunities but you’ll have what it takes to be better and more in demand than other proofreaders.
Some of the skills needed to become an awesome proofreader include: having an eye for detail; being well-organized; having great focus; and a complete understanding of grammar and spelling. It also wouldn’t hurt to have knowledge of different formatting style guides so you can work on white papers and more academic content.
