A Proofreading Checklist Before You Submit an Essay
Proofreading checklist?
A ten-minute proofreading checklist for essays and reports: the errors spell-check misses, how to read your own work, and how to use a grammar checker well.
I have lost marks for “there” instead of “their” in an essay I had read five times. You can’t proofread what you remember writing — your brain fills in what you meant. These are the tricks that actually catch mistakes.
Leave it, then change how it looks
Put the essay away for a few hours, even just overnight. Then change the font or the size, or read it on your phone. New-looking text gets read instead of remembered.
Read it out loud
Slow, every word. Missing words, repeated words (“the the”) and sentences that run on for ever are obvious when you hear them. Your device’s read-aloud feature does this for you.
The checklist
- Homophones: their/there/they’re, its/it’s, affect/effect, than/then.
- Agreement: “The results of the study were”, not “was”.
- Apostrophes: “the student’s essay” (one), “the students’ essays” (many).
- Tense: past for what you did (“we measured”), present for what is generally true.
- Numbers and names: check every figure, date and author name against your source.
- Citations: every in-text citation has a reference, and the other way round.
- Formatting: headings consistent, page numbers, the right referencing style, the word count within the limit.
Use a grammar checker — and read what it says
A grammar checker catches the mechanical slips your eyes skip. ParaFree’s grammar checker gives back the corrected text and a list of every fix as original → corrected (reason), so you can see each change instead of accepting a whole new version. Read the list: some “errors” are deliberate (a quotation, a term from your field), and the reason tells you whether to keep the fix. Run it last, after you have finished changing the content.
What should I check in the final two minutes?
Check the file name, the format the portal wants (PDF or Word) and that the right version is attached. If it has to be a PDF, export it from Word with Word to PDF so the text stays selectable.
Related: Grammar checker · Paraphrase without plagiarising · Word to PDF
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