Proofreading services are easy to find on the Internet today, and they are also relatively affordable. If you are a student, an academic, or a businessperson, it is likely that you will have already used a proofreading service, especially if you take pride in your work. However, for those of you who have not used this kind of service before, this article explains the point of proofreading, and shows why expert proofreaders can give your written work the best chance of presentational success.
The basic point of a proofreading service is to find mistakes in punctuation, spelling, and grammar throughout your document, and to correct these mistakes. For example, if you make errors in numbering, capitalisation, or sentence structure in your document, a professional proofreader is trained to spot these, and to make the necessary changes to resolve them.
Image: Proofreading – Simple is better than complex
A common misconception, and one that often leads to customers being dissatisfied with the proofreading services they receive, is that these services cover issues such as formatting, style, and structure. As a case in point, some researchers, before submitting their journal articles for peer review and publication, ask proofreaders to check over their work, expecting that they will format the document consistently for them, optimise their style or concision, and – in all sorts of ways – make their writing easier to read and more attractive to look at. Crucially, this is not the point of proofreading. As emphasised, proofreading focuses on surface errors, not on other deeper content issues.
So, the point of proofreading – despite what many others on the Internet will claim – is to add a final polish to a piece of writing, ensuring it is free from various kinds of mistakes. This is reflected in the definition offered by the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English, where the term “proofread” is defined as the process of “reading and correcting a piece of written or printed work”. By contrast, editing, which is frequently confused with proofreading, is a more comprehensive process. Editors do all sorts of things that proofreaders do not. For example, editors may add or remove unnecessary content from your document, and they usually focus on issues such as your writing style or your concision (i.e., did you use way too many words to express something quite simple?).
Image: Proofreading helps you to add a professional polish to your written work
While the point of proofreading is fairly restricted, as this article has shown, having a proofreader look over your document – or checking your document yourself, if you are a strong proofreader – is vital for high-quality writing. In a sense, the point of proofreading is to improve the impact of your document, ensuring that pesky language errors, or embarrassing typos, do not impede the reader’s understanding of what you are trying to say. It’s also worth remembering that no matter how good a writer you are, creating a perfect piece of text without checking what you have written is difficult. For this reason, proofreading occupies an essential place in every writer’s toolkit.
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