Essay Proofreading Ideas: Eliminating Grammar Mistakes

Most students have some idea of what proofreading is but many don’t know just how precise the act proofreading should be. It’s an exercise in deep-reading through an entire with care exactness to find and correct errors.

Here are some essay proofreading ideas to eliminate grammar mistakes and take your writing to a new level:

List your common mistakes.

Take comments from past term papers and essays and make a list of your common grammar mistakes. The list may include apostrophe errors, comma splices, verb-subject agreement and more. Pick up a grammar handbook or check online to learn about how to correct your errors. Learning from your mistakes will have you writing great essays in no time.

Add extra line spaces in your paper.

Add three or four spaces between lines in your paper before proofreading it. Sometimes errors are easier to spot when sentences aren’t spaced together so closely. The extra space allows you to also write comments about your content, which could lead to some revisions.

Proofread with a ruler.

This grammar school exercise is one that should never have fallen out of fashion as you got older. Placing a ruler below each line of your paper as you read will help you slow down enough to catch errors.

Read your paper aloud or have someone read it for you.

Reading your paper aloud will help you hear things that don’t sound right. For instance, you may have a run on sentence that could confuse readers. Or you might find a misplaced comma that breaks the flow of the sentence. It would be a tremendous help to find someone to read the paper out loud for you. Since they’re not used to your work, they’ll be more likely to pause over confusing language.

Read your paper in reverse.

Start reading your paper from the end and work your way to the beginning. Despite it not being logical, many writers find it a great way to improve their abilities to express ideas in clear language. It might seem a little troublesome at first but you’ll quickly be able to see the relationship between two successive sentences and learn to re-write them more clearly.

Sentence-level proofreading can positively affect how your audience will regard and evaluate your work, not just your writing. Most grammar errors, for instance, that teachers and professors find are ones that could have been found by diligent proofreading.