Read and Repair... then Revise and Repeat!

Published Monday, August 2, 2010 9:00 pm by Susan Schlag

Most writers I know do a little happy dance whenever they finish a particularly difficult writing task. They hit "save," then snap the laptop shut without another thought. In spite of repeated warnings to proofread their work, students and professionals alike often skip this crucial step. The result? Typos, punctuation mistakes, and poor word choices. Proofreading helps writers avoid these common problems.

Here's Scholar's Secret's short list of favorite proofreading tips:

• Read your work out loud - natural pauses in the spoken version should map on to some sort of punctuation in the written one
• Read your work backward - this helps you spot typos, misspellings, and poor word choices
• Mark-up a printed copy - it's often easier to see mistakes in print than on screen

But what about inconsistent use of language, flawed argumentation, or failure to properly attribute the ideas of others? Or worse, excessive verbosity?! Finding and correcting these types of problems requires a revision strategy. Such an approach starts with this assumption:

• There is a better, less bombastic* way to express my thoughts.

In other words, you must be willing to step back and admit that some of your sentences may need to be rewritten. Paragraphs may need to be re-ordered. Entire sections may even need to be deleted.

Scholar's Secret helps writers at all levels revise their work so that it's not only mechanically correct but compellingly argued and stylistically crafted as well. Ready to go beyond proofreading? Contact us anytime!

* i.e., "wordy." (Scholar's Secret vowed on July 12, 2010, to invoke at least one new word from "The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate," by Eugene Ehrlich, in every Psssssst! from now on!)