Essential Proofreading Skills to Master — UNBXD

Whether you’re a professional writer or just someone who reads their emails before they send them, we all do some proofreading now and then. Many of us will have first been exposed to the art of proofreading back when we were in school, when our teachers would remind us to double check our work before handing it in.

Now, as adults in the corporate or creative worlds (or in that strange place where both overlap), proofreading is part of our everyday workload. A lot of the time, we may not even realise we’re doing it - having a quick read through a document before you send it to your boss can feel like second nature.

If your role requires you to do more proofreading than the occasional glance - for example, if you’re a content writer in a team creating copy for social media posts, or if you’ve been asked to proofread a pitch for some external stakeholders. In these cases, there are some essential proofreading skills and techniques which you should master to make your life easier and allow you to produce higher quality writing.

Essential Proofreading Skills

Attention to detail

A quick scan of the page is not going to cut it when you’re proofreading! Pay close attention to every word and every piece of punctuation. Whilst some errors may jump out at you even when quickly reading through, there are others you may miss unless you’re looking closely. A little comma can look suspiciously like a full stop when you’re in a hurry!

Grammar rules

Having a good grasp of grammar rules is an essential skill for a proofreader. Not only should you be able to identify that something doesn’t sound right, you should be able to explain why, and how to correct it. Understanding and applying grammar rules correctly ensures proper sentence structure and coherence.

Here are some of the most common grammar mistakes made by British adults to look out for:

Mixing up homophones, such as:

Your/You’re
Their/There/They’re
Affect/Effect
Too/To/Two

Using adjectives instead of adverbs

Incorrect: I brushed my hair real quick.
Correct: I brushed my hair really quickly.

Dangling modifiers

Alice nearly ate an entire loaf of bread/Alice ate nearly an entire loaf of bread.
Did Alice eat ¾ of a loaf of bread? Or did she just look at the bread and consider eating it all?

Spelling

Develop a keen eye for spotting spelling errors, including commonly confused words like the homophones listed above. You should also keep an eye out for any regional variations. If you’re proofreading a piece of writing for a British audience, you should follow British spelling rules - for example, colour (UK) vs color (US), and centre (UK) vs center (US). Organisations will generally specify which you should use.

If you’re not confident in your spelling skills, start by learning how to spell some of the UK’s most commonly misspelt words:

Word - Common misspelling

Manoeuvre - Manuver

Mischievous - Mischevious, mischievious

Necessary - Neccesary, neccessary

Occurrence - Occurrance, occurence

Questionnaire - Questionaire

Receive - Recieve

Relevant - Relevent

Separate - Seperate

Tragedy - Tradgedy

A lot - Alot

Appearance - Appearence

Calendar - Calander, calandar

Conscious - Consious

Definitely - Definately

Embarrassed -Embarassed

Environment - Enviroment

Existence - Existance

Liaise - Liase

Remember: you don’t necessarily need to have the correct spellings memorised when you first start. You can - and should - always have resources handy so you can double check spellings you aren’t 100% sure on. Manoeuvre is the one that always gets me!

Punctuation

As a proofreader, you should know the correct usage of punctuation marks such as commas, semicolons, colons, and apostrophes. Many of these are used erroneously by many people - especially apostrophes, which are often mistakenly used to denote noun plurals.

Apostrophes should be used to show a contraction (it’s, they’re, we’re) OR possession:

Incorrect: I love taking my dog’s for a walk.

Correct: I love taking my dogs for a walk.

Also correct: I love taking my sister’s dogs for a walk.

The tricky part is when you have a possessive plural:

Incorrect: I love taking my two friend’s dogs for a walk.

Correct: I love taking my two friends’ dogs for a walk.

You should carefully check each sentence to make sure each one is appropriately punctuated, both in terms of punctuation rules and the tone of the work.

Consistency & clarity

Maintaining consistency is a large part proofreading: here, you have the chance to look at a piece of work as a whole with fresh eyes, and this can reveal variances in tone, style or formatting which can be missed when reviewing a piece of writing in sections. To achieve consistency, you will often be expected to use a style guide - whether you’re using a guide developed by the organisation you’re working with or a commonly used style guide such as Hart’s Rules.

Spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, and formatting are among the things which have an impact on the consistency of the writing. Capitalisation of headings and subheadings should be the same across the entire document, and the formatting should be consistent too - this includes things like font type, font size, and styles such as italic or bold.

You should also ensure that the text is clear and easily understandable to the intended audience, and doesn’t use any jargon or acronyms not easily understood by those expected to read it.

Contextual understanding

Contextual understanding - or, at least, the ability to gain contextual understanding - is an essential proofreading skill. Some industries use certain words or phrases in ways we may not expect. For example, in the construction industry, ‘snagging’ refers to a process where builders check for any issues or shoddy workmanship in a project. The word ‘matter’ is another word which changes meaning based on the industry - in law, the ‘matter’ is the issue at hand, whilst in agriculture, organic ‘matter’ can be found in soil.

Understanding the context of the text allows you to ensure that it conveys the intended message accurately.

Formatting

Check for proper formatting of headings, subheadings, lists, and citations according to the required style guide. Other formatting details such as margins, line spacing, font size, and indentation, should also be checked to make sure they’re consistent throughout.

Formatting headings and subheadings correctly is also important for SEO, as they help the search engines to understand your content. Appropriate formatting in general is important for accessibility and readability.

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