It is my firm belief that creative people and content creators are artists in their own right. They work hard to pour their heart and sweat out on a literary piece and the only thing they want at the end of the day is recognition and serene satisfaction that comes with it. However, before you make your ‘well-researched discourse’ public, you need to subject it to a Baptism of Fire. You need to proofread an article and I’ll tell you what is the best way to proofread.
SEO optimization, incorporating mini data packages of relevant keywords, researching, and planning your blog post are indeed crucial to the creation of an article but the final step should always be joyful. Proofread an article, perform paragraph proofreads and your document will be easy on the eye of every reader who glides his eyeballs over your sentences.
How to proofread an article?
Here are the six best ways to proofread your document.
1. Use A Proofreading-grammar Tool
We are Indians ‘born and bred’. English intuitively isn’t the default language to slip from our tongues. We are used to our hard-core, unadulterated local accent be it Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, or Marathi. Thus, it’s quite understandable that we make grammatical errors in our articles. Unless we take private tuition from Shashi Tharoor which I’m sure isn’t true in any of our cases.
I suggest that once your final draft is done and dusted, copy-paste the entire article over MS Word and edit it for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. However, if you want to reap the complete benefits of a true proofreading-grammar tool, partner your ties with ‘Grammarly’ for eternity.
‘Grammarly’ not only checks for misspellings and impropriety of grammar but also empowers with the ability to convert simple words into elegant and refined vocabulary. It makes suggestions for how you can better your sentences to the extent that they melt in the mouths of your readers like vanilla and ice.
2. Time Is Limited And The Only Way Of Saving Time Is By Taking Time
If you want to ease the procedure of proofreading articles, try to be vigilant and careful while writing your drafts. Don’t bother and hassle yourself if you can’t concentrate. Put it off to the next hour, take a break, go out for a walk, or even wait until the next day.
Only sit at your desk when your mind is perfectly poised. The more attention you pay to layer and detailing in the initial stages, the less you’ll have to google ‘What is the best way to proofread?’ No one got anywhere in a hurry but the hospital.
3. Reinvent Yourself / Don’t Repeat Yourself
SEO proofreading and grammatical proofreading can often be objective but the instinctive tool that will help you embellish your blogs is reinvention. Constantly learn new words. Learn how to use them correctly and make a string of sentences. Try to include them in your conversations. Learn what are the different ways of writing the same thing and how attractively you can present the same thought.
This is a skill you can’t master overnight but can hone with persistence and dedication. Who said being a blogger was an easy job. Don’t force yourself to inundate extravagant words into your article. Learn two words a day and find a way to sneak them into your next blog post.
How do you proofread? Deepening one’s connection with the English dictionary is how you naturally proofread.
4. Be Mindful Of Your Use Of Punctuation Marks And Spelling
Indeed MS Word and Grammarly can assist you in correcting spellings but what it can’t detect is the sinful mistake of cross-dressing homophones. There are times when you use ‘there’ in a sentence but were supposed to use ‘their’. You wanted to type ‘new new’ but ended up with ‘knew knew’. Autocorrect can even pile on misfortune by misinterpreting words, switching verbs like ‘were’ with ‘we’re’.
Similarly, groom yourself to use the right punctuation marks. You can search for the types of sentences you can end with exclamation marks. Try and inculcate the use of quote-unquote to mark ‘dialogues’ and ‘intellectual opinions’ and make the reading experience more robust for the viewer. Avoid the usage of excess words and jargon. Make your content compact and informative. This is one of the more reliable yet often the most ignored methods of proofreading a document.
5. Be Noble Enough To Give Credit
The Internet is littered with articles and material that you can give a makeover to forge an article. And you won’t be tried before a jury for it. However, you can be tried by your conscience for betraying the ethos of blogging. Giving credit often seems to be the most repulsive proofreading step.
Always make sure to give credit to the original source of the information, statistical data, and figures you drop in your blog. Mention reference links to enable a healthy flow of traffic on the internet.
6. Savor The Flavor
Stand in front of a mirror and read your article out loud. Measure every sentence, wax, and wane the words to make sure the sentence has the right flavor. This might not sound like a proofreading step. That’s because it’s way more than that.
What’s the point of writing a blog when you don’t enjoy the process of writing. Read your article out to a novice. His limited information on a certain topic would eventually direct him into pointing out the exact portions where your blog needs more research and explanations. And this in my book should be the last step in proofreading an article.
Footnote –
Proofread an article to filter out the crudeness. Careful polishing of blogs makes your content look appealing and professional and merits recognition in the blogging communities.
