Proof Positive: How to Edit Your Own Copy
Posted on Jun. 4, 2015 / Subscribe 0
By Joseph Priest, Corporate Writer, Syniverse
You’ve just hammered out a difficult news release, beat your deadline by an hour and left yourself one last opportunity to polish your work before you submit it. But you don’t want to proof this yourself after being so close to it, and you don’t have any co-workers available to look at it before deadline. What can you do?
It takes a village to raise a child, and bringing in a cold eye to proof your work is without a doubt the best way to ensure accuracy, clarity and quality in your writing. But when this isn’t possible, there is still a way you can proof your own material effectively. In my 15 years as a writer and editor, I’ve developed five central guidelines that I use to review my own copy as best as possible.
No matter how well-written a document is, a single mistake can eclipse the quality of the rest of the communication and become the thing that the readers remember the most. Regardless of how long you’ve worked on a document or many times you’ve reviewed it, if you’ve made any recent changes to it or are not 100 percent sure it reads flawlessly, it’s important to sweat the details with one final proof and not settle for anything less than perfection. These guidelines will help.
- Rest between writing and proofing - Once you’ve finished a piece, take a break from it for as long as possible to give your mind time to forget about it and fill itself with other thoughts. This distance will allow you to come back to proof your piece as objectively as possible.
- Change environments - Before you begin proofing, find a space away from your normal workspace – an empty conference room or a bench in an open area, for example – that will allow you to get away from the usual email, phone and people distractions. Not only will this change of location allow you the quietness to concentrate more easily, it will take you away from the comfort zone of your familiar computer, desk and chair to give you that extra sharpness to scrutinize copy better.
- Proof on hard copy - This could be the single most important guideline for proofing. Always review your work on hard copy. Proofing on hard copy allows you to read a printed text more naturally, enabling you to look down to read instead of looking horizontally. It also lets you take printed text with you to an optimal location for reading, and it helps you review with a keener eye because you’re breaking away from that familiar and comfortable computer screen.
- Read out loud - Similar to reviewing on hard copy, this can prove an invaluable aid that enables you to see your work from a different perspective and judge it more objectively and minutely. By rendering your piece in an oral format, you can take advantage of a different one of your five senses to pick up on errors, discrepancies and questionable passages.
- Proof at least two full times - Begin your proof with a preliminary skim of the document to ensure that major typographical features – such as font size, line spacing, text alignment and bullet indentation – are correct and consistent. Next, make one complete editorial read-through (pass), reading it at about the same speed and level of detail as your intended audience will upon first reading. Then make your second pass, reading v-e-r-y slowly to scrutinize and ponder everything from spelling and punctuation to grammar and word order, and also to look for errors that you may have missed on the first pass and to fix any errors you may have introduced on your first pass.
Do you use any similar guidelines yourself? Would you add any guidelines to this list? Email me at [email protected] to let me know.
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