How to Proofread Your Own Work in a Pinch

My college roommate wrote papers in the worst possible way.

He would sit down the night before a paper was due, log into his computer, and pull an all-nighter, usually turning the finished product in within minutes of its due date.

Every. Single. Time.

When you’re a 20-year-old college student, you can pull off that kind of stuff (who needs sleep when you’re young?). When you’re a small business owner? Not so much.

How can you still ensure quality output when you don’t have time to send it to an editor?

But sometimes life happens, and you have to write that blog post or presentation at the last minute.

It’s okay; we’ve all been there.

But then you’re stuck with a problem: How can you still ensure quality output when you don’t have time to send it to an editor? You want to avoid obvious spelling, grammar, or formatting issues that would make your blog or PowerPoint suffer.

Thankfully, there are steps you can take to proofread your own work.

Here are five of them to help you find and fix the mistakes in your document or presentation when hiring an editor is unfortunately not an option.

5 Tips for Proofreading Your Own Work

1. Don’t proofread or edit right away.

Whenever possible, don’t begin proofreading your work as soon as you’ve finished the first draft. Step away from your content for a day or two if possible. This allows your brain time to forget what you’ve written.

We all have the tendency when reading our own work to see what we intended to write, as opposed to what’s actually on the page.

Whenever possible, don’t begin proofreading your work as soon as you’ve finished the first draft.

While it may not be possible to eliminate this fact entirely, by stepping away from your document for as long as your schedule allows, you can at least mitigate it to some degree.

2. Use grammar and spell-check tools—but don’t solely rely on them.

Grammar and spell-check tools are helpful—in fact, I use them myself every day. But like any tool, they are only as good as the person wielding them.

I find it helpful to view these types of tools as “junior” or “intern” proofreaders.

They are pretty good at pointing out the most egregious of errors (basic misspellings and the like) and asking good questions like, “Should that comma really be there?” and “Hey, I thought there was supposed to be a hyphen between ‘serial’ and ‘killer.’”

I find it helpful to view these types of tools as “junior” or “intern” proofreaders.

Occasionally they’ll even have an intelligent thought about how to reword a phrase or sentence.

But I would never stake my professional reputation on them—I’d estimate they’re wrong as much as they are right.

Nevertheless, they can be helpful as a second set of eyes, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to see what they might have to say in any case. They have definitely alerted me to errors that I should have caught but missed.

3. Invest in a good dictionary and use it!

As a proofreader and editor, the book I use the most often—by far—is my copy of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. You can buy the Kindle version for under $15, and it’s worth its weight in gold.

Having this dictionary in ebook form makes it extremely easy to look up any word.

English is a difficult language that often makes absolutely no sense, and spelling is no exception. So when you are proofreading your own work, take the time to look up any words you either don’t know how to spell or just don’t look right. It only takes a couple of seconds, and it can help your content stand out from the competition.

Side note: you might be wondering, “Why not just use a free online dictionary?” These can be good tools, as well, and I sometimes use them if the word I’m looking up isn’t in Merriam-Webster’s. But there are a few drawbacks.

English is a difficult language that often makes absolutely no sense, and spelling is no exception.

First, many free dictionaries are laden with ads, causing the page to load slowly and dragging down your internet browser (and probably dumping who knows how many cookies onto your hard drive).

Second, it’s not always clear who is maintaining these dictionaries. I’ve seen entries in online dictionaries that I personally believe were flat-out wrong. With Merriam-Webster’s, you know you are accessing a vetted, professional dictionary.

4. When in doubt, look it up.

In a corollary to the last point, when you are proofreading your own work, if you are not 100 percent sure about something—look it up.

Even if you’re 99 percent sure something in your document is correct, now is the time to listen to that nagging voice in your head and double-check it.

If you are not 100 percent sure about something—look it up.

This goes for spelling, facts and figures, use of idioms or technical terms, and anything else.

It’s much better to be über-critical of your work at this stage than to let a careless error slip by because you were “pretty sure” it was correct.

Proofreading is all about having a critical eye, so question anything that looks amiss.

5. Read your document in reverse.

This is a pro tip.

As a professional, I read every document I receive at least two times (and usually more): once from top to bottom, and then from bottom to top.

Reading a document in reverse forces you to focus on the words themselves and not get caught up in the flow of thought.

This makes it less likely that you will overlook an error or mistake because your brain has projected what should be there onto the page.

Reading a document in reverse forces you to focus on the words themselves and not get caught up in the flow of thought.

And it’s this practice that really helps you find the last 20 percent of mistakes—the little things that when added up can make a big difference.