Thursday, October 4, 2007

Proofreading Work

Grammar Girl provided some interesting techniques into proofreading one's writings; from emails to essays. Her first piece of advice is to have someone else read your work, however she points out that this is not always possible, like for example an email. She offers four other examples that a person can do themselves. The first is to read the piece of writing backwards. I tried this with my post about my youtube clip and it was confusing. I had never heard of this technique before and to be honest it was quite difficult. My brain couldn't function, it wanted to read the post from top to bottom. Therefore I decided to try read my work out loud, which was another technique of her's. This one went a lot smoother, and I was able to spot multiple errors that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Overall I will definitely take this advice to heart, because as hard as I try to proofread, I still seem to be marked down for errors.

1 comment:

Maureen said...

Mike, you're right - proofreading won't find every error, especially the ones you don't realize are errors.

For instance, in this post you have a couple little mistakes (misplaced semicolon, comma splice, incorrect apostrophe use), and I can tell that you've proofread - you just don't have all the rules down. So that's good news: the knowledge will come. We'll keep working on grammar this semester. Then, armed with your new proofreading techniques, you'll be unstoppable!