Tips & Tricks

Follow these additional tips to make your persuasive proofreading the most efficient that it can be:

• You should print out your persuasive essay and proofread it as a hard copy. If you proofread on the computer screen, you are likely to miss a lot of errors.


• When you are proofreading, make sure you label why something has to be fixed. For example, if you circle a word and then keep proofreading and then come back to put the edits in hours, or days, later, you may not remember why you circled that word. Did you want to remove that word? Is it misspelled? Should you use another word in its place? Was it missing punctuation?


• At least once, have someone else proofread your work. You can proofread it exclusively if you want, but when you have someone else proofread it, they will find a lot of things that you may not. You know how you want your persuasive essay to sound and when you read it, you may actually see the persuasive essay the way you want it, not how it is. Let a fresh set of eyes look at your essay.


• Break down your proofreading between your various readings. In your first, look for spelling mistakes. In your second, look for grammar errors. In your third proofread, look for structure problems; and in your fourth, look to see how the persuasive essay flows when you read it.


• Read your persuasive essay out loud at least once when you are proofreading. You will catch a lot of errors by doing this, rather than just reading it in your head every time.


• When you are proofreading for spelling errors, don't just do a spell check on the computer. Computer spell checkers are notorious for being of poor quality and they can actually make your persuasive essay sound worse than it should.


• Also when you are doing a proofread for spelling errors, read your persuasive essay backwards. When you read it in such a way, you are paying attention to each word because you have to focus on it to read it backwards. When you do this, you will catch a lot of spelling errors you may miss reading it the regular way.