Top Proofreading Tips: How to Proofread

Proofreading is a complex and elusive skill requiring much greater subtlety and detail than some people are aware of. We take a trip into the mentality of a great proofreader, exposing the skills and attributes that make a successful proofreading career and exploring how to use them to your own advantage.
Follow our guide for some top tips to first-class proofreading and copyediting.

Top proofreading tips: common grammar mistakes

For editors and proofreaders one of the most time-consuming aspects of the job is not the actual business of correcting grammatical errors, but combing through a text to find them in the first place. This third blog follows our articles focusing on spelling and punctuation errors to provide you with some of the most common mistakes made in grammar by writers, both academic and professional. This checklist of frequently occurring problems should make the proofreader's life easier by directing them straight to the likely areas where a writer may have made grammatical errors.

Why Proofread? What’s the Point?

The function of a proofreader - The job of a proofreader is carefully and meticulously to check through every word of a text, editing out any tiny mistakes in spelling, grammar and punctuation. Many people think that essay editing ends there, but in fact proofreaders are also responsible for countless other tiny adjustments of structure, style and syntax, leading to a dramatic overall improvement in quality.

Split infinitives

Split infinitives are one of those pesky grammatical ideas that many people have heard of and have a vague idea will cause a loss of marks in an essay or undergraduate dissertation, yet aren't really able to define or avoid. In fact, to define 'split infinitive' is much easier than you might think, and the idea that they are grammatically 'wrong' is a myth, though you may still want to edit them out to be on the safe side when essay editing or proofreading, particularly in coursework or marked essays.

7 Errors You Must Notice When Editing

If you are editing typescripts, here are some classic mistakes to look out for. It is absolutely vital you do not leave these errors. They will make you look very careless and for essay proofreading or for dissertation editing, mistakes could lose the writer valuable marks.

Its/it’s – Remember that this is an exception to the possessive apostrophe rules: Its means “belonging to it” and It’s means “it is”.