The Under-Appreciated Art of Proofreading

Is it an art?

One could argue that proofreading is not an art, but certainly it is under-used and under-appreciated.

The best manual can be made worthless by careless mistakes. First, there’s the confusion that typos cause. Second, there’s the fact that typos reduce the reader’s confidence in what you are trying to say.

Automated tools

Some of these tools are easy to use (spell checkers and grammar checkers). Some, however, may not function exactly the way you want, particularly if you are using the world’s most popular word-processing software.

Although spell checkers and grammar checkers do a great deal to eliminate those sneaky little typos, they cannot replace a human being proofreading your work.

Why people still need to proofread

Although I hate to sound like a Luddite, the automatic tools are no guarantee that your document will be error free. For instance, if you use the automatic Table of Contents feature and add pages to your document but fail to click the automatic update button, your Table of Contents could still be wrong.

There’s also the problem of whole pieces of text being deleted (or not deleted) – who would notice this but a human reader? Technically, finding mistakes like this isn’t exactly proofreading, but any proofreader worth his or her salt will catch errors like this.

Nothing will replace the human effort involved in proofreading. Consider, for example, the case of a manual for Widget Model 453. Chapter 1 refers to it correctly as Model Number 453 but Chapter 2 refers, mistakenly, to Model Number 454. This is something that only a human proofreader could catch.

Likewise, if an important word is left out of a sentence, a grammar checker will not catch the mistake. For example, if the sentence reads “Do insert the wet plug into the socket,” only a human proofreader will know that it should read “Do not insert the wet plug in the socket.”

Proofreading tips

Here are a few proofreading tips that may help you eliminate these types of errors:

• Don’t proofread your own writing – give it to someone else. It’s always hard to find the mistakes you yourself have made.
• Proofread for different elements in different passes. For example, in the first pass, check headers and footers. In the second pass, check for correctly numbered steps and cross-references. In the third pass, check for correctly numbered figures. In the fourth pass, check Table of Contents, etc. In the last pass, read the document aloud as described below.
• Reading the document aloud slowly is probably the best proofreading trick. If you read aloud and concentrate on every word, you will almost certainly notice mistakes that you would otherwise have missed.
• If possible, when reading the document aloud, have someone else follow along silently. This almost guarantees you’ll catch those nasty little mistakes.