Editing and Proofreading: General Strategies

The writing process normally involves revisions because it is a thought process that keeps on changing. Before a final draft is prepared there is a lot of thinking and rethinking that goes on the idea. At the point where the essay editors are handed the content, it is believed that they are dealing with the final draft and they are just readying the content for publishing or submission. On the other hand, a proofreader's task is to work on the edited material to fine tune it to make sure that it is error free.

 In as far as writing is concerned, correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, style and structure are a prerequisite. It is also important to adapt the right kind of strategy that will indeed help you slow down and examine your writing. Hard, right?

When writing it is important to play the role of the reader as opposed to the writer because it will allow you to know whether your writing is logical or not. Even before going for essay editing services you need to make sure that your content is well constructed and makes sense. If you implement the following strategies in your editing and proofreading skills, you should be able to perform these tasks without any hiccups.

Editing   

 When editing your own material, your main objective is to try as much as possible to catch errors that are typical to your writing style. You need to know that editing basically focuses on some of the common mistakes that are very popular with an individual writer. Since these mistakes occur now and then effective editing should be able to identify these errors. Here are some strategies that can be used to identify the errors:

• Try reading the paper out loud and be keen on listening for the errors
• Get into the habit of reading sentence by sentence that way it makes it easy to identify errors
• Pay much attention on patterns of error
• To be an effective editor, you need to know your grammar and understand your punctuation rules

Proofreading 

 

 As the final stage of preparing your paper, proofreading basically focuses on random errors that may be available after editing. You can adapt the following strategies to polish up your proofreading skills:

• Put yourself in the shoes of a reader and read the paper as a reader
• Get in the habit of reading sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph
• You may also want to read backwards. Here, try reading from the bottom right hand side of the page in an attempt to identify spelling errors or typos.

 These strategies have been known to be very effective and can help anyone who is willing to improve their editing and proofreading skills.