Proofreading and time management: A quick guide
There are some things money cannot buy in this world, and one of the most famous is time. However, people who have used professional proofreading services understand that, simply by paying someone to provide professional proofreading for their written work, they can effectively buy themselves more time.
What is proofreading?
If you have ever written an extended document before, you will be intimately familiar with what the proofreading process involves. In contrast to editing, which begins after producing the first draft of a document and continues until the draft is finalised, proofreading is performed only on the final draft of a document.
Proofreading, unlike editing, only addresses surface-level issues, including inconsistencies, misspellings, and punctuation and grammatical errors. As such, the purpose of proofreading is to rid a piece of writing that is already of a good standard of errors and inconsistencies. Proofreading, therefore, is a less involved process than editing, but it is nonetheless essential.
Image: Proofreading is not the same as editing, but both are valuable
Professional proofreading and time management
Hiring the services of a trained professional to proofread your document differs in several important ways from the normal process you might use to check your work before submitting it. First of all, people who provide professional proofreading services are experts with extensive experience, qualifications, and a proven track record. For this reason, their refined ability to proofread written work will lead to a higher-quality outcome overall.
At the same time, perhaps the most fundamental difference between proofreading your work yourself and hiring a professional to do it is the benefits you gain in terms of time management. We all have our own, often distinctive, strategies for managing our time effectively, but when it comes to writing, working with a trained proofreader is something we all should be doing.
The main reason why students, academics, and professionals can all save time if they work with a proofreader relates to the time-consuming nature of the proofreading process. To remove every error from a piece of written work in a reliable and consistent way, significant time and careful attention must be dedicated to the task. Therefore, if you ask a professional to check the final draft of your written document for errors, this is an opportunity to save your valuable time for another task.
Image: See how much time can be saved by working with a proofreader
Pitfalls to avoid
It’s worth emphasizing that working with a proofreader may not always save you time. This is especially true if you have the bad luck of hiring an unqualified person. When this happens, you may need to spend time checking their work, and because of the lack of trust you have in them, you are likely to spend even more time on the proofreading process overall. With this in mind, we strongly recommend doing some research to find a reliable and high-quality proofreader, particularly if you have never used these services before.
Professional Proofreading Services 