Revising, editing and proofreading

Proofreading your work

CONTENTS

2. Proofreading your work

What comes into my mind:

Meaning:

Proofreading is one of essential activities that a student needs to do before submitting essays
or research chapters. It is an activity to check whether the projects have been appropriately
written in terms of accuracy (grammar and vocabulary) and meaning (content).

What I did for proofreading:

Based on my study experience in pursuing my master degree, I checked these two items for
my written assignments either just by myself or by asking my colleagues to proofread them.
When I did it by myself, firstly I check the language accuracy by setting my office (ms word)
to be in English in order to arrange the sentences in proper grammar automatically. Then, this
is the hard one, I would check the vocabularies whether they were appropriates to use or
needs to be replaced by other words. In this case, I used to refer to thesaurus software which I
installed in my computer.

Comparison from the Section I have read:

There is a new information I’ve got from this section that proofread also means we have to
check whether our written tasks have followed the appropriate styles and conventions of the
University where we study, or the journal where we submit our articles. While I just focus on
language accuracy and vocabularies while proofreading my tasks, this section which was
published by https://library.leeds.ac.uk/ Suggests that proofreading is also a good chance to
cut content out or move it around. Moreover, proofreading according to this reference, is a
good chance to refine the details and check that the edited content still makes sense.

Another additional information that I have got from this website is, besides focusing on
language accuracy and content, in proofreading we also need to pay attention to references to
make sure that they follow the University style, and the appearance including layout, tables,
and figures which should be correctly arranged. The tips given to do proofreading by our
ownselves are likely similar to what I did during my postgraduate study such as using
microsoft word checking tools and thesasurus software. Reading aloud, however, would be a
new way of proofreading but useful for me particularly, as I have never done it before. This
section explains that by reading aloud, it will slow our reading down, and prevent us from
skim reading and missing errors. This is the new and challenging part of proofreading which I
would try to do it for my next journey of study.