The Importance of Being Proofread

By George Chilton - Website Copywriter, Speech Writer and Proof Reader

Even the most ardently written, professionally produced, and painstakingly typed document needs to be proof-read, and preferably by someone with a fresh pair of objective eyes.

We are often blind to our mistakes and read what we meant to say, rather than what we actually said. An objective view of a piece of text can dredge-up a whole host of errors that had been missed in previous, subjective, readings.

The example below shows a section of text before it has been proof-read.

In the early period of the century the novel itself was still developing and hadn't not yet cut itself free from the umbilical support on the Romantic poet's. As a medium it was not confident enough too stand alone. As such, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was borne out of the Romantic poetry of the late eighteenth an early nineteenth centuries an she alludes too it throughout her novel. In particular he references The Ancient Mariner, bye Coleridge...

Most word-processing programs will highlight your spelling errors, point out your repeated words and accent your grammatical misnomers, but they do given an intelligent read through. They will not pick up a misplaced word, or a freak-typo where an 'at' becomes an 'as' or an 'an' becomes 'and.' That's where the humans come in. There are nine errors in the above text - and most are easily spotted, but errors such as 'hadn't not', 'he' instead of 'she' and 'on' instead of 'of' are easily scanned and missed. If, for example, you write a 10,000 word document and fail to have it proof-read you are leaving it to chance; and leaving it to chance is unprofessional.

The text below is the corrected version of the sample text;

In the early period of the century the novel itself was still developing and had not yet cut itself free from the umbilical support of the Romantic poets. As a medium it was not confident enough to stand alone. As such, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was borne out of the Romantic poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and she alludes to it throughout her novel. In particular she references The Ancient Mariner, by Coleridge...

The errors have been spotted by an objective proof-reader and the text can be published while you are safe in the knowledge that your document is as professional as your well researched content.