10 Tips on Proofreading Your Blog

Reading becomes difficult when the written article contains errors such as spelling, punctuation, grammatical and poor sentence structuring. The flow of reading is lost with the presence of these errors. There has been a lot of effort made to reduce these errors. A blog is a place where you can put your online content, and there has been a lot of discussion about proofreading your blogs and for the same purpose, there are so many proofreading service providers available online. These service providers can make the posts written on your blog free from grammatical, structural and punctuation errors. You can get it done by these professionals, but it will cost you. To avoid this cost, it is better to proofread your blog yourself.

Proofreading is a very tedious job but can be made easier if you follow a defined procedure. The following section is meant to give you tips for learning the art of proofreading. Here are the top ten tips for efficient proofreading:

1. Concentration – The key to efficient proofreading is concentration. You are required to concentrate on finding the errors. I will recommend that you to turn off music and your cell phones, sit in a room in isolation, and forget about your SMS and emails, at least for a while. Don’t let anything interrupt or distract you.

1. Use printed copy – Instead of proofreading on a computer monitor try to proofread on a printed copy. This can eliminate the stress caused by the computer screen on your eyes. You can concentrate more and can find more errors while proofreading on paper, when compared to your computer screen. Moreover, it saves your precious eyes from a high amount of stress.

1. Watch out for Namesake – Namesakes are the names or words having the same spellings as others, but have different meanings.

1. Have a look at the contractions – Try to find out contracting words like “its” and “it is”, “you’re” and “your”, “their” and “they’re”. All of these words look similar but have very different meanings.

1. Punctuation – Look out for punctuation errors. Punctuation errors are hard to find, and you will need to concentrate hard on checking a sentence again and again to find all punctuation errors. Get a feel for the words and then decide whether the overall paragraphs are conveying the message you want to have.

1. Back track – Next tip is to read the blog starting from the last sentence. This is a very common technique used to find out the errors in the blog. Reading the blog from the last sentence makes you aware of the conclusion and now you have to check whether the blog is moving in the right direction by trying to find out the question. You know what you wanted to write and are less prone to miss the errors which otherwise would have been missed.

1. Have a break – Try to have a break after 20 – 25 minutes. Breaking up the proofreading of your document will increase your detection of errors.

1. Read out loud – This is another very important trick used in proofreading. By reading out loud, you read each word independently, which provides you a great chance to find the errors; whether punctuation errors or missed commas.

1. Ask someone else to proofread it – Once you are done with proofreading, ask someone else to take a look, this will help you ensure that your writing is free from errors and offer you another opinion on the tone of your post.

1. Check for grammatical errors – Finally, check for grammatical errors, these are the most basic mistakes one commits.

Following these steps will get your blog proofread efficiently and effectively to ensure your blog is free from errors.