Edit & Proofread Like a Boss: Art of Content Polishing

You have written plenty of content along your lifetime, from school to college, each of us gets bombarded with content creation tasks. Of course, if you have plenty of experience in polishing your creations, we hail to you, but most people do not follow the right editing & proofreading techniques that bring every written piece to masterpiece level. There is no dead end here, and a bit of investigation and personal interest are just enough. We’ll bring you secrets, tips, and recommendations of effective editing & proofreading, things like that come from industry insiders (Hey, psss, never tell anyone we’re sharing with you, it’s a professional secret).

Know Difference Between Editing and Proofreading

These two processes are basically two sides of the same coin. Editing is your first stage to content review, restructuring, and most often repairing. Yes, you break writing before acknowledging that, you’ll just find it out a bit later. During editing stage, you analytically observe where content has flaws in logic, clarity, and accurateness. Let’s look at models of good sentences on these criteria.

• If A fact happens, then B fact is possible to appear leading to scenarios of C or D.
• You can’t accomplish that with A action, choose B scenario, it has advantages C, D, and E.
• The person A was first who invented that. Document B indicates in the year C.

Find out several creative solutions for the above problems, from new angle in this article.

On the other hand, proofreading is a continuation of editing. See it as a stage 2 in the whole process of polishing a written piece. You shouldn’t neglect efforts during proofreading, concentration has to be maxed out to notice those tiny misspellings, typography quirks, wrong grammar, and technical requirements for style & format. Find out some examples from mentioned areas, there are plenty of them during proofreading.

• Be grammar nazi. Grammar is a weak point even for native English speakers who cannot explain why words, phrases, and sentences emerge in writing as they are. There is an explanation to everything, and not knowing grammar rules like tense agreement, word confusion (homonyms, they sound alike), forms of possessive case, and modal verb misuse could play badly to your writing, making it a joke.
• Typography & style, a twix. Look of text and its readability are directly connected. Your writing has to have well-sized headings and paragraphs, correct punctuation, and right format of bullets and tabulation. These petty aspects create subdermal perception of your text, people won’t start reading unless they’re OK with what is in front of them. Pay attention to the following text elements like line spaces, bullet formats, size of headings, paragraphs, and margins on sides of page. Capitalization of text title is also important, it has to correspond to certain rules.

Small Workshop Is Always Good

We want your writing to be solid and consistent, unlike Campbell’s soup. Three takeaways will help you to see and correct own mistakes, people often do them. Check them out below.

• Some words do not add to context, throw them out. Their name is grammar expletives, and they’re annoying as flies. There is, that is, it is, and here are serve as common examples. Such constructions link other nouns later in sentences although there is no need for that. Just replace them with nouns you intend to use.
• Use power of straightforward verbs. Get rid of wishy-washy verb forms or phrasal verbs. A single verb can carry more expressive capacity than any phrasal verbs that blur the meaning of action you’re transferring to readers. See it on your own, compare two examples.

She dives into passion of writing one English sentence.

She writes an English sentence.

          One verb is enough to denote a plain action, to create a simple entity (in this case, sentence). Of course, if it was about magnum opus of writer’s life, you could use bright metaphorical phrasal constructions.

• Dust off colloquial speech. For most forms of formal writing, it is vital. Not only you sound polite and respectable, you’re also meeting set forma (essays, letters, CVs). Most adverbs (absolutely, entirely really) will go away with redundant constructions (as a matter of fact, owing to the fact that). Leave these things behind, write clearly.

Bottom Line

       I hope that the above material & takeaways will matter for your future writing. Not afraid to write more, make mistakes, this path leads towards self-perfection. Talent and expertise are growing inside of you, your inside pro-writer shine and create cool writing pieces. Edit & proofread always, these skills need training all the time.

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